Gnosticism, Cults and Patterns (dDeS28XGQtU)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dDeS28XGQtU

Did you hit it? There it is. Alright. We’re on. We’re live! With Nick! Who’s now Nicholas. I don’t know. I would never… Yeah. Either or. Oh wow. Uh oh. Uh oh. Uh oh. Blankets. Well, there we go. Get a blanket. Wait. What’s happening there? I don’t know. I thought I organized it a bit. Oh. Organization. Who even does that? Room dirtiness panic. Yes, yes, yes. We gotta like participate in the right patterns. Cause we get lost. Yeah, so Let’s introduce Nick a little bit. He’s one of the old time buddies on the internet here. Yeah. Traumatized Mark. Multiple times. Which is an achievement. Infamous for my elephant riding. Yes. Ugh. Ugh. He talked to you and since then he’s done nothing but bug me about open ended T-Lost elephants. Like literally. If you don’t shut up about the open ended T-Lost elephants I’m getting on a plane and I’m gonna take care of you the right way, man. Mano a mano. There is an optimal way to ride an elephant and it is not strapped onto its tail. Also true. And confirmed. I am horrified by what you’re saying. So, yeah, we’re Is that better Nick? Oh nice. That’s right. We need to post it note that says open ended T-Lost elephants. Because we need to have propositionalize our participation. Cause else we get confused. Nice. Ugh. Yeah, I think I think a lot of weird things happened right before this. Right? Karen Wong from the Meaning Code contacted me and said what do you think of this video? It’s a James Lindsay video where that he just did recently. It was a recent talk. And he’s talking about Gnosticism. And I just put out a video recently on a pattern of cults basically. Right? So patterns and conspiracy is what it’s called on navigating patterns. And yeah, I mean it’s interesting that all this is sort of coming together. You can see sort of I would argue the Gnosticism popping out of out of Verveckis work now. Because it’s inevitable. Right. Especially with the practice oriented situation. Because that’s the downside of practice orientation is that you achieve through the practice. And then it inevitably starts kind of wanting to take a Gnostic shape. I mean I think Vervecki tries to do a good job of keeping that at bay by focusing on things like dialogos. You know, as opposed to like whatever classic Buddhist practice go alone to a mountain somewhere and meditate until you attain enlightenment. Right. Right. Well and also I think it’s fine if you have a framework. And if you don’t, you don’t. And then the thing that our buddy Ethan came up with, which I just thought was absolutely brilliant. He put it on one of the shorter videos that Vanu Klay did recently. It was based off of one of my comments. But he said, you know, basically there’s being is good versus emergence is good. And I was like, oh, that’s a really good explanation for what’s going on. And it was it was funny. So Father Eric came to visit me for a week. I mean, a wonderful time. It was absolutely wonderful. He did live stream from my office. Big Mac. And I don’t think you know him. He came on later because you abandoned the ship. Remember? Yeah. But it was funny. We were we were standing out on this bridge at the zoo in Columbia. There’s a stone bridge that goes over the river. It’s beautiful. We’re just staring out at the river and he goes, oh, so when you’re looking down because you knit together heaven and earth, you see emergence. And that’s the only thing right. And it’s like, yeah, that’s right. Now you get it like because you’re ignoring the imagination. And I think that was the weakness in Vervecki’s work was was always like, well, you can do this on your own by yourself. It’s all individualistic. And I think the pattern of individualism or the trap of individualism leads you into the pattern of Gnosticism, the pattern of Neoplatonism and the pattern of occultism, which I saw Lindsay did a video called WTF is SEL, which is just great. What’s SEL? Socio-emotional learning. Oh, OK. So it’s this new scam that the globalists are pulling on the schools effectively. I see. And in there he basically, I don’t know if he outright says this, but he implies that Neoplatonism always leads to occultism. And I’m like, oh, yeah, that sounds about right. It was a pretty good argument. That’s interesting. Yeah, that’s really bizarre. It’s kind of a full circle type of thing because Platonism in many ways was trying to get the people out of occultism. They were overly bound in occultism. Pray to the god of the doorway and the doorknob. One of PVK’s favorite things to point out. But it does, by the time you get to the monad and monism and then it starts branching into alchemy, you know, I mean, very, very deeply the practice of alchemy comes out of the Neoplatonic tradition in many ways. I mean, even if you look at like Newton. So yeah, it’s weird how it kind of went full circle. I guess it’s actually not that weird because it did pull people out of the 10 million gods world. But it didn’t really do anything to change the way of relating to the world. It’s almost like it just scooted everything up a meta layer. Right. And then it was not grounded. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. And then you have to descend again. And what happens when you descend, you get idealism. Right. Well, you get, yeah. Right. And so it’s like now you have the idea that it’s going to emanate. Right. But it’s not an idea that is an actual emanation. Right. Like it’s an idea of what you perceive to be the thing that will liberate. Right. Like the way that you construct it is, well, there’s insufficiency. Right. And this is the path that will provide a solution. Right. And then you let the path emanate. And now you’re stuck again in the previous game. Right. But now you just made a subset of the pluralistic unification. Right. And now you got the specific again, but now you’re stuck in the same problem. And then you need to lift it up again. Right. Like this is what Hegel was talking about with Aufheben. Right. So you’re lifting it up back. Right. So what are you doing? You’re seeing the insufficiency. You’re going back to the realm of the forms and the interconnectivity. Right. And then you can like drag it back down again. But it’s all you. It’s all you. Right. Like it’s all projection necessarily. Well, and it’s, yeah, I think there is because the other aspect here is you know, one of the main aspects of the Gnostic drive is a fundamental rejection of the material world for the ideal. Right. It’s like trying to escape and not being able to. Like you’re constantly smashing your head against that escape. And it’s, Hegel is almost like calming the tension down and reorienting the focus, saying, wait a second, that pattern you’re playing out of going up and dragging it back down and going up, right, the synthesis of the two worlds is a good thing. That’s what you should be pointed towards, not the escape into the ideal. But there’s a frustration that builds every time you repeat that pattern. Right. And you see that the ideal never makes it in. Right. It’s always a distorted, you know, form of the thing, no matter how perfectly you try and, you know, bring it back down into the world. Well, you have to update it, right? Like, that’s the problem. Right. It’s a process, not an ideal. It’s the wrong framing to consider bringing it down perfectly. Yeah, but yeah, you’re not bringing it down. But the problem is, that’s what we’re typically narrowing is like. Because what are you doing? You’re having an understanding. So you’re moving into a direction. Right. And now, like, your movement in that direction is frustrating. Right. So we’re going to attempt more to the direction. We’re going to attempt more to the direction. So you’re reciprocally narrowing into a solution. And therefore, like, yeah, like, you’re reciprocally narrowing into a utopia. Right. Where in fact, you’re not having a balance of principles. Right. Like they’re communing in God. Right. But instead, one of these principles is going to be salvation. Right. Because that’s the thing that’s going to get you out. And you’re going to be worshipping that principle. So I have an idea here as a knife maker. Which is, maybe the reciprocal narrowing isn’t actually a problem. No, it’s not. It’s almost like you’re hunting for the crack in that wall. Right. You’re making, or even the biblical line, the way is narrow. Right. Easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle. Right. So there’s something where that focusing the whatever that motion is into the finest, tiniest little, it’s like how you’re trying to get through into a new territory, a new space. And I guess that is, I mean right now I’m like forming a defense of Gnosticism. Yeah, I was wondering, like do you want to get to this new space? And I want to address this. So we’re talking about Neoplatonism and then I think that Neoplatonism doesn’t exist. Okay. I think it’s that’s this is a made up term by made up people, which is why we’re on third wave Neoplatonism according to John Verbeek. If it’s one thing, why are there three versions? I’m a little confused. Right. So I think the reason why is because it doesn’t exist. What they’re talking about, and I talked to Dr. Linton Jack about this, who talked to John. That’s an excellent talk by the way on AI, the Matrix and the Plato’s cave. It’s a great talk. Everyone should listen to it. John’s really good in that talk. Partly because I know Jack and I gave him my critique of all Verbeek’s work before the talk. So he had plenty of ammo, right? But what we’re really talking about here, when I talked to Jack about this, where are these Neoplatonists? And he said, well, no, no, there’s a bunch of them. They’re all small groups. Like we’re talking less than 200 people and they don’t agree. So there’s little groups of 30, 50, 100, 150 people spread out throughout the Hellenistic world and they’re calling themselves Neoplatonic. What does that mean? That means they have, all what they have in common is Plato. What they don’t have in common is anything else. And so they’re an identification again. And then when we talk about Gnosticism, because Grimm brings this up, so he says you all use Gnostic as a catchall for secret knowledge or the right way that Demiurge made the place. It’s both. Like the idea of secret knowledge comes from the Demiurge making the place. Like that’s where the Gnosticism. And conspiracy, right? That’s the secret knowledge, is that this is not the proper creation. Right, right. That’s exactly. And otherwise there isn’t secret knowledge. All is or can be revealed to you directly. And that would be the Christian conception, is all is or can be revealed. Well, I should say all is revealed to you, but you may not have eyes to see. And that’s part of the work on your side that you need to do. And now that we have sort of a better framework, and then cults of course, well that’s your area, Nick. You’re the cult guy. So yeah. Well, I like the idea that a cult is a broken religion or an incomplete religion or something that you can’t live your entire life in. So it may fill 80 or 9% of your life or 60% of your life, doesn’t matter. But you can’t live just within that. In other words, it’s parasitic upon the people in it. And it’s parasitic upon things outside of it. Otherwise it can’t exist. Right, whereas the Christian argument would be, no, no, no, we’re encompassing everything because we’re starting from being as good and there was a creation. And you were born within that creation. You exist within that framework. Well, to support your point here, because I have a I’m sure I’ve given this before, but I have a very broad definition of what a cult is. Yes. Not occult, but a cult. Oh, where was I going? Oh, you can’t live in culture. You cannot live just upon culture. That’s what we are trying to do right now. Right? That’s what the secular world, what its belief is, is that we can uphold like entire moral systems, entire, you know, the whole thing, just on the fact that we are loosely grouped together. Right? It’s a parasitic is exactly the right word. And it’s like we don’t know what the host is. But what we do see is that there’s this type of constant degradation occurring that would be natural for a parasite that is consuming its host. Yeah, I think a different way of conceptualizing is when you get technology, right, and when you get affluence, there’s a way in which you can sustain things by putting effort in them. You can sustain things by pure will. And the less that you’re bound by your material immediate constraints, the more you have the capacity to live in a fantasy, which is like really, really extreme nowadays with the online worlds. And the ability to live in a fantasy is parasitic. And then this idea is that the fantasy is going to emanate back, at least if you’re a pragmatist, like some people are just escapists. That’s a different problem in some sense. And if you’re if you have been an escapist, then you want to become pragmatic effectively, right? You want to take with you how you think the world should be. And then what are you going to do? You’re going to pretend that something is an emanation instead of like going from from actual being, right? And recognizing or discerning where the emanation is, you’re invoking it, right? And the further you are in your fantasy, the more energy it costs to maintain these fictions, right? And I think that’s what’s happening. So we’ve created this progressing disconnection with nature, right? Not only nature outside, but also nature in ourselves, right? Like, oh, we just use chemicals. I want to drag a little bit of… I really like that framing. And I almost wonder then, you know, if the only real difference is just does the energy source work or not, right? Because in a very real way, you could say that this is exactly what’s occurring with religion, except that the energy source continues fueling the system, right? In some way, the fantasy starts actually emanating because the battery doesn’t exhaust. And then it’s almost like you could… If you almost accept the frame that we’re disoriented, we can at least run a test to see if the thing fueling our fantasy drains itself as parasitic or if it continues giving. Now, of course, there’s a huge danger there, which is that you could find an energy source that’s very powerful, but does drain. That’s what the ancient gods are, right? Like, I started making a distinction between sacrifice and submittance, right? Because in both instances, you kind of surrender your authority, right? Like, you sacrifice, you’re placing yourself under the authority of the other, right? But in the one, it’s a trade relationship, right? So, if I make a sacrifice, I’m trading with you, like, I give you this and you make me more powerful in whatever way that may be. But if you’re submitting, right, like you change your identity from the individual to become part of this larger body. And being part of the larger body is the thing that allows you to participate in a generative way, right? And have an identity that is being fed. And therefore, it’s not a sacrifice, it’s not a strain, right? There’s a way in which there’s a communion of these aspects. And I think we’re not understanding that anymore. Like, we’re completely lost and we’re going into the sacrificial stra- Well, if all you think is that there’s the self, then necessarily, submittance is the ultimate sacrifice. You will experience it necessarily as a sacrifice because there’s nothing else to commune with. Right. And this is where we get the hermeneutics of suspicion, right? Because what is the hermeneutics of suspicion? Well, what is the sacrifice that’s being asked of you? Like, that’s literally what you’re doing. You’re looking for the sacrifice that’s asked of you. And that’s not healthy. And like we had this conversation a while back and like I don’t understand why I hadn’t seen it before, right? But if someone is in the hermeneutics of suspicion, which effectively means when you say something, I cannot accept it as true. Axiomatically. Right? Right. Then you can’t have a conversation. Like, you can’t be generative. Because the person is blocking intimacy. Like, there’s a failsafe that will cut off intimacy when it starts to happen. It’s like, oh, like, if I’m getting intimate, that means I’m manipulated. Like, it literally means that I’m manipulated. Well, they’re trying to have it both ways. Right? They’re trying to say, you can’t impose on me, but now because in order to act in the world, and you have to act in the world, you’re going to impose on somebody else, now it’s an unfair relationship. And that’s the quality of the connection. That’s the intimacy. Quality of connection between people. That’s what intimacy is. And now you’re in a problem. And I’ve seen, we’ve been seeing this on the Awakening Server, although it may not be on the Awakening Server much longer. We’ve been seeing this. Like, people are saying things like, well, no, no, no, if you do that to somebody, it’s automatically a violation of some kind. And they were using the word rape. And I was like, what? Like, where did you get that? Right! Well, and as though there’s no valid way, right? Because the gnosticism and some of that crazy sort of neoplatonic ethos is, well, look, if, you know, and this is Hegel, right? Like, if I can’t, if you can’t impose on me, because I don’t want you to impose on me, then I can’t impose on you. And therefore, the only way for us to get along is for neither of us to impose on either of us. And it’s like, then you’re not getting along. Like, I don’t think, you know, and they get trapped in that, you know, the only way to have sex is not, consent to sex is not to have sex. I mean, literally somebody said that today. And I was like, no, that’s literally the opposite. Like, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Gosh. Just wait until they realize what they’re doing every time they eat. I know. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, with one of the other aspects of this gnostic stuff is like data-driven things, right? So, well, we’re going to like do, we’re going to go on this path, and they don’t have the data yet, right? Like, they’re going to generate the data while moving on the path, and then they can adjust accordingly, right? So now we’re in this dialectic with the thing that we’re doing, right? But it’s not a participatory dialectic, right? Because whenever you’re doing anything at all, right, you’re going to make corrections, right? Like, if I’m trying to saw a piece of wood and like it doesn’t work, like I get feedback of reality. It’s like reality doesn’t want to cooperate, and I’m like, okay, I can either stop or I can adjust, right? So I’m always in this dynamic relationship. But if you do it data-driven, right, like now what are you doing? You’re pre-selecting a set of categories that are going to be important, and now you’re going to have to re-select a set of categories. So the point of the data-driven is just to reinforce the category, right? So you could almost say that the purpose of the dialectic in that situation is, or right, this, you know, everyone that talks is raping each other mentally, right? What you’re doing by framing it that way is you’re over and over. So the only purpose of the dialectic is just to feel your own boundary. Right. Right? You’re stacking the wall in some sense. Right. Well, then you use it. You end up using it as a filter, right? Because this is one of the things, this is where I think Lindsay, and I didn’t like his, in some sense I liked his new talk, and in another sense I didn’t, because the problem was, and the title is The Negation of the Real, which is really cool talk, but the problem with this framing is it’s very conspiratorial, it’s very like, well, you can trace this through this person to Hegel, to Mark, through Mark, and all this nonsense. And I’m like, no, no, I think what’s actually happening is that you, by yourself, because you can, come to the Gnostic or occult ideal, or at least close to it, right? Because it’s very solipsistic. So you get there, you’re like, and it’s obvious, like to some sense Gnosticism as in secret, forbidden, hidden knowledge is obvious. There are things I don’t know about the world, because I’m not making correct predictions about them. And there’s a lot of them. Right? And so that’s correct, there must be knowledge that I don’t have access to. Right? And then so I arrive at that, all by myself. I don’t need any help. I arrive at that. Okay? And then suddenly, it’s like, oh, wait a minute, here’s other people who have talked about this. Oh, look, it’s Hegel. Well, everybody knows Hegel. He’s wicked smart. So yeah, you know, everybody knows him. And Marks, of course Marks was right. Because I came to the same conclusion by myself. And now there’s two problems. One is, why must be wicked smart like them? Because everybody tells me they’re wicked smart. It’s like, okay, maybe. I don’t think any of them are particularly intelligent, much less wicked smart, we’ll say, in New England vernacular. But also, you’ve gotten a validation for your idea. So this guy validates my idea, and I seem to be at least as smart as him, or close to it. And you know, they’re kind of revered, at least by some people. And now, I’ve got an instant audience of reverence, at least from my perspective, whether that’s actually happening, it’s a different story, right? And so you’ve got this self-reinforcement on top of the solipsism you were already trapped in. Yeah. Confirmation is run wild. Yeah. And then it’s like, well yeah, emergence is everything. Because the world came up to meet me. Yeah, right. Like it’s even worse, because if you start accusing someone of being racist, they’re going to dislike you. Like, just because of the accusations, right? And you put them in the race framing. So like, what do you think is going to happen? Like, there’s only one answer to that, or you have to have the saints in front of you. That there’s like, oh, you’re putting me in a framing, right? And I’ve got to break this framing. Like, Lindsay was talking about a wizard circle, and I really, really like that conception, right? Because what are you doing when you introduce the race framing? Well, you’re drawing a circle, and you’re saying, well, we’re in the circle, right? And then look at how everything looks within the circle. And then what is the wood that you need to be cut off in order to resist that? Well, you need to be pretty damn sharp about what’s going on. And then it gets even worse, right? Because now, like, we’re in the circle, and now there’s a problem in the circle, right? So now we can all agree that that is a problem in the circle. Like, there’s nothing wrong if you accept the circle, that that is a problem, because it’s actually a problem. And now we can do the dialectic process, right? So now we can outhaven, we can lift it up, right? And we can find the solution, right? And now we’re trapped in the process, right? Because, like, you solve that problem, but we’re still in the wizard circle. And now there’s going to be a new problem. Right. Well, and that plays into the postmodernism, right? Because what they’re doing is they’re sneaking in a frame. And so they’re saying, no, there’s no frames, there’s no narrative, there’s no, no, no. And they sneak in the frame, and then you’re trapped. The thing I don’t like about that, or we’ll say is sort of missing from that outline, is that you can also sorcerer yourself into a circle. Like, it doesn’t need to be someone outside of you. And when you do that, the circle you come up with, and this is where the recurring pattern comes in, right? Navigating patterns, right? When you do that, you get something like Hegel, you get something like Marx, you get, they’re all the same for a reason. And that’s because that’s probably the limits of cognition of people that will bother to get to the point of thinking about these things. And that’s and so you’re perfectly happy to go into somebody else’s circle. You never believe your own propaganda. Thank you, Father Eric. That’s a good advice. But you do, you do enchant yourself, right? And that’s how, that’s what happens. And it just happens to look like Hegel and Marx and whomever else that it looks like, right? It just happens to look like Neoplatonic thought. It just happens to look because that’s the pattern. It’s a pattern that we’re caught in. And I think one of the weaknesses of, say, Vervecki’s work in particular, but a lot of these things is they say, oh look, addiction is reciprocally narrowing and addiction is bad. I think we can all agree on that, right? And the solution is reciprocal opening. Okay, but if you just do reciprocal opening, you have a different set of problems. Now you’re psychotic, right? You’re over connecting the world. And that’s all you see are conspiracies and over connections. And look, there’s a correlation. It must mean something. And it’s like, oh, correlation doesn’t equal causation, guys. And that’s where you get, you know, that’s where you get stuck, right? And then it just feeds on itself over and over and over again. And there’s no, you know, we’ll say easy way out of that. Right. And then what does pluralism do, right? Like pluralism is like, well, let’s have a bucket of all of these circles, right? And then we can make a circle that contains all of the circles. We can play this game. It’s like, oh no, and now we can have this game where we’re not falling in the trap of being trapped in the source of a circle, right? But it’s not realizing that you just made a really, really big circle. And the circle is up in the air, right? And then whenever it’s going to come down, like you’re going to have to create a smaller circle, right? And now you’re separate from the big circle again, right? Because like whenever you have to act in the world, like you have to disconnect from the combinatorial explosion nature of the unity of everything, because like the unity of everything can’t inform your action. It can though. No, it can’t. But, okay, I think here’s so maybe an interesting metaphor to use here would be how we in the real world, the metaphor would be how do we create energy systems and how do we transform certain types of energies into other energies? So you have something like an internal combustion engine, right? And it has, right, it’s not, I, it’s not an accident that we call our economy one that functions on a boom-bust cycle, right? That’s literally what an internal combustion engine is. It boom, explosion, and then bust blows it out the exhaust pipe, right? And it produces movement and energy in this process. So in some way, we can kind of take this, this cycle, this almost Hegelian pattern of the emanation to the, to the emergence and view it as a motor, right? And by cycling through these two states, we are producing energy that allows us to go out and act and hopefully more efficiently in the world. So what are other energy systems that we could use, right? Because yes, in modernism, the great invention was the internal combustion engine, or steam engines, and then the internal combustion engine, which are both boom-bust cycles. Now we’re moving into like nuclear energy, and that’s a different, right, there’s different principles guiding it. Now it still has something like a boom-bust cycle occurring, but it’s happening at so rapid a rate that it actually becomes like a different type of thing. So maybe that, like, now I’m going to jump again. When someone, or when we describe a state like living in grace or being connected to God’s will, right? Submitting the will to God, right? Living through that. In some deep sense, what’s occurring is that that motion up and then back down to the specific, right? Up to God and then down into this is occurring at a rate that our cognition can’t even recognize or see, right? So then you are entering into a state where you’re always kind of in shock of yourself, right? It’s, the way I’ve described it is that you become part of the revelation, right? You’re no longer owned by yourself, so you’re just watching yourself as part of the revelation of God in the same way you might watch anything else in the world and recognize that revelation, right? You become a mystery unto yourself. So I think that that is similar, right? In some sense, what we’re doing is we’re talking about what’s occurring there in a really slow time scale. That boom bust, boom bust, where we can watch how it happens. We can recognize the pattern of it in our daily or yearly life, you know? But I don’t know if it’s wrong, right? It’s a good description. It’s just that in some way where I don’t know. It’s almost like being able to describe it blocks you from it in a weird way. It becomes its own kind of solipsistic loop to recognize the patterns you find yourself caught in instead of that giving way into it. I don’t know. I’m off in weird territory now. Well, there are limits to what you can know, right? And this is the problem. A lot of this Hegelian stuff and these other philosophers, they go, I can see the boundaries of the aquarium I’m swimming in, and therefore I can know the aquarium. And it’s like, no, you can know something about the aquarium, but you can’t know the whole aquarium. And all this sort of reminds me of this, right? Now, the interesting thing about this model is that one side of the model is based on this principle. And the principle that it’s based on is the principle of linear and discrete, versus continuous and nonlinear. And that’s the whole key, is that when you engage with that, of course I have a video on the Knowledge Engine slide where I go through the whole thing, when you engage with that, you suddenly realize that this is kind of the same as reciprocal narrowing versus reciprocally opening or widening or however you want to talk about it, which means the perennial problem there is how much of each. When to broaden, when to narrow. That’s the perennial problem. Again, this is the old right to see the ocean in a drop of water. The continuous, fully embodied within the discrete. It’s old stuff when we’re talking about. Same as well, also, with that diagram we’re using the hemispheres. Why do all the religious figures have halos? What is it? There’s a very distinct sensation people have been having for a long time where the spot where their two hemispheres connect becomes really active. Like you can literally feel it as a physical sensation. So those two processes almost fully both of them are going fully and you’re balancing on that tight wire of right where they connect to each other. I don’t even know if they do ever connect. It might be a vibration. It’s just a really fast one. It’s so fast you can’t notice it happening. As opposed to discrete continuous. Yeah, but I think what you’re doing is you’re reducing it to one connection. If you look at it as multiple connections that have different time frames. I like to look at three frames, like myself, the other, and the world, for example. Or me right now, like me in context of my day and me in context of my life. There’s multiple frames and I swap between them. When I’m talking to you I don’t need to think about what I’m going to do next month. In a different situation I might. There’s things that snap you out and they put you in this different frame. What are you doing? You’re updating these frames at different cycles and sometimes you get moved into a different cycle because something happens. What you were describing as grace, I actually had an experience like that, where it’s like there’s a sense of novelty and then there’s a sense of urgency. There’s an overwhelmness and the overwhelmness is in some sense like you can’t go and oversee the consequences of your action. Taking action is more important than finding the consequences of your action. When you’re in the state where you’re being in that overwhelmness and you’re not doing the freezing or the flight response but you’re doing the fight response then that is maybe the state of grace properly. If we go back to the metaphor of the nuclear reaction, it’s like the energy of the nuclear is going through whatever valve and it’s just like it’s overflowing the capacity of the valve and so you don’t see that it is a valve anymore. It becomes part of the pipe. I had an analogy I used to use a lot to try and describe that experience and the way I framed it is that most of us go around in life with this internal sense whatever of being a cave. And so we address the world as if we’re a cave. So we go around we collect things, we store it in the cave, we slowly bring things back out of the cave when we need to use them and it’s a very particular way of relating. Very abstract metaphor I’m trying to use here. And what it felt like to me is that I’m not actually a cave. What happened is I’m a tunnel but I filled the tunnel with so much shit in the effort to hold on, to store, to be prepared that I turned the tunnel into a cave. I filled up the wall. And now things couldn’t get through so I then just accepted that and lived as if I was a cave. And then suddenly it rains a lot. There’s a big flood. It’s been raining here a lot. And all that crap gets washed out and suddenly you’re like oh shit, I’m a tunnel. Like I’ve been doing this wrong the whole time. And what is the purpose of a tunnel? It has a very different use than a cave because it’s defined by how well things move through it. How frictionless. How much it can let go of what comes in. And that very much felt like the state of grace. That’s why I ended up with conceptions like humans are incapable of love. Because we’re a tunnel fundamentally. I can’t generate love. What I can do is take it in and then let it flow back out. It just is a cycle. And it’s there all the time. That was the other big, you know, that agapic love is there in every breath you take. It’s by, it’s the love that lets the oxygen do what it does in your body. Right? That’s the chemical reactions, the whole thing is the secondary part. But the way you’re actually you’re like bathed in it constantly. But if you don’t you know it’s very easy. It’s like it’s so omnipresent that it’s the easiest thing in the world to ignore that it exists at all. Well, you kind of have to. If you if you read Flatland, which is a wonderful book and everybody should read it and it’s small. And it’s understandable even by math idiots like me. So everybody should be able to engage with Flatland. The thing I learned from Flatland is that if you perceive three dimensions, you are in a fourth dimension. You’re a fourth dimensional creature. And so that’s the water you swim in. Can you know something about the fourth dimension that you’re in? Yes, you can. But what would that look like? Well, technically if we were fourth dimensional creatures, it would look to us like time only went in one direction. Because that would be the constraint. And in the book Flatland, he demonstrates this rather nicely with the lower dimensions. Like if you were a dot on a piece of paper and somebody stuck a pencil through it, what would it look like? It wouldn’t look like a circle opening up in front of you. It would look like a line coming at you. It’s like, oh, and that’s because you can’t perceive the dimensions above you and therefore, right? It’s like, oh, this is a whole… And that… The Gnosticism is the sense that, oh, I know I’m in an aquarium, or an ocean, or whatever. Aquarium is easier. I know I’m in an aquarium because I bumped up against the walls. Right? And it’s like, okay, but does that mean you know all the walls and the limits on top and bottom? And how long you can jump out of the water and how much information you can get from jumping out of the water? Because you can’t get all the information no matter what you do because you’re still constrained by the dimension that you’re trapped in, where it’s fourth or fifth or whatever. It doesn’t matter. And that’s where we get confused because we’re like, well, I can know something about it, therefore I can know everything about it. It’s like, no, but you also, you don’t need to. Like, you don’t need to, in some sense, and this is where I get wrapped around the ax. I mean, Vivek, he’s recently doing his after Socrates, right? He’s talking about, well, Socrates says, I know that I know nothing, and that’s clearly absurd. And I’m like, no, that’s clearly literal, and that’s what he meant. Knowledge has very little value. And then he’s right about that. Socrates is only right about two freaking things in his whole life, and John gets one of them wrong, in my opinion. I know that I know nothing. Yes, he’s right about that because knowledge is not, it’s not that important because the love is flowing, and you can just interact with it. You don’t need to know it. You don’t need to talk about it. You don’t need to propositionalize it. You don’t need to think about it. You don’t need to do any of that. You can just feel it and spread it to others. You don’t need, and some people do this with clearly a low eye. Children do this all the time. I mean, like children, right? And they’re clearly stupid. By definition, children are dumb. Like they haven’t learned anything yet. They don’t have any knowledge, right? And the fact that we understand innocence in that way. Innocence is in relation to knowledge and experience, right? And so in John’s world, that would be propositional knowledge and participatory knowledge. That’s what innocence is. It’s a lack of those things. And like fair enough, I don’t have any problem with that definition. But that also means you don’t need them to live, and you don’t need them to live a good life because you can just do those things. The other thing Socrates got right, by the way, just for the record, is he drank the damn hamlock, which means he stuck to his principles rather than compromising by leaving. And you could argue that point, right? Well, maybe he should have left and compromise was appropriate. Oh, maybe, right? But that’s a different argument. I would say sticking by your principles is always important. Even if there’s better ways to stick by your principles because no one’s perfect as it turns out. At least I can prove this by saying, I haven’t been able to be perfect. I’m a lot closer than most other people. So there you go. We are perfect. I mean, it’s funny listening to you talk, Mark, because it’s so like, so many like Bible lines are popping up in my head as you’re describing it, right? I mean, what we are talking about is like living in faith, right? You must be his children to enter the kingdom of heaven. So there’s some connection between faith and innocence, right? I wanted to go back to the tunnel analogy, right? Because like one of the characteristics of the tunnel is that it’s dark. Right? You’re not supposed to look around in the tunnel. And what will happen when you start looking around in the tunnel, well, you’ll get trapped in the tunnel. Maybe you’re like, well, if I don’t remove that spot there, right, like I might bump my hat sometime. So you’re just gonna like keep looking up and then you’re gonna build a thing to not bump your hat and then you start clogging your tunnel. And then you’re in a cave again. And now we can just branch that right into Plato’s cave. Right. Well, and that’s Plato wasn’t quite smart enough to see that it was actually Plato’s tunnel. Right. Right. Or maybe he was too smart. That was the problem. They didn’t have tunnels yet, Nick. Come on. They didn’t have tunnels. They didn’t invent them. No, and what happens when you make the cave, you’re in a cult. Because the tunnel is the only thing you can live within, right? It encompasses everything. Because you can go back through it. And my problem with Plato’s cave is that it needs to have a drawing that actually depicts it correctly. Because the problem with getting out of the cave, and there’s three states in Plato’s cave and everybody casts it as two. Like, oh, you break free and then you can get out of the cave. No. Most people break free of the chains. Right. So they do the Matrix thing. Oh, I’d rather live in the sewers of dead cities. It sounds terrible to me. I’m like, plug me in, dude. I’m like, sorry. I’ll be your battery all day long. I don’t want to run around in the sewer of a dead city being chased by monsters. That sounds like a terrible life. And even snot. Oh, yeah. It sounds wonderful. I’ll be plugged in. Right. Well, what’s the problem? The problem is, that’s the middle condition of the cave. Because the middle condition is you break free but you don’t leave. So you’re stuck. You’re standing up in the cave and you see the light being projected on the floor but you don’t go there because you have to duck down to get there. And that would be the better image of the cave. And then as you crawl, so you duck down to get towards the light. And as you crawl towards the light, that tunnel gets narrower and you have to duck more to get out. And that’s what it is. People are getting out of the, they’re getting unchanged but they’re never leaving the cave. And they’re seeing the spot on the floor and going, every time I look at the spot on the floor, I’m having a profound experience. And then they’re saying, I’ve been transformed, which is not true because they haven’t left the cave. And then they’re going back in and saying, come on guys, I can show you the, and then everyone’s trapped in this, in the purgatory, in this middle position, right? Where it’s like, well, we’re not getting in the light. We’re not transforming. We’re not leaving the cave at all because we’d have to submit. We’d have to duck down. There’s a spot in the cave with no shadows. Right. There’s a spot in the cave with no shadows. Yeah. Well said. You’re wrong. I can make my own shadows. That’s There you go. Well, that’s when you’re caught in the cave. But when you’re caught in the cave, what are your options, right? Your options are make your own shadows or stand out there alone. And nobody, you know, and so yeah, it totally makes sense. So I think that adding that third state to the cave and making it clear that, no, you need to submit in order to get the hell out of the cave and get the transformation that you desperately need and cooperate with others. And you can go back in. And that’s the other part that everybody you’re supposed to go back and chain yourself back up again and cooperate again to keep the machine moving. It’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. So Or take a pickaxe to the back wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then take to the center of the Earth. I guess. You’re right. I also had this observation, right? Like so the way that Lindsay is framing all of this stuff, it’s negative thinking. So the video is also I mean, he’s connecting the negative thinking to negative theology, right? So what is negative thinking? Well, it’s pointing away, right? It’s in some sense Well, it’s not identifying against, but you’re you’re making a category of noting this, right? Not this, not that. Apophatic theology is the other. And so what are you doing there? Well, you’re creating framing without authority, right? So if you only move to the world by what is not, right? Like you can never make a positive statement, right? And so you don’t have to submit to to the authority. Kind of. So this is kind of an irony, right? It’s like the little cult bubbles. And what you can do is say, look, there’s empty space between all of them, right? Except that the moment you say, look, there’s empty space between all of them, you’ve made another bubble. It’s a really awkwardly shaped one. But right, you’ve created a boundary by defining against all the things that are. Right. And then, you know, I don’t know where you go from there. I think it’s an important part of the cycle. Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to do that? Right. Well, if you view being in a bubble as being trapped and the only way out is to live in the space between the bubbles, you may fall into, you know, that bubble that is just the space between bubbles without realizing that that’s what you did. Right. Although I wouldn’t, yeah, but the space between bubbles doesn’t have an identity, right? Like it’s literally chaos. Right? Right. And so if you live, right, like living means that you’re not chaos, right? By definition. So you’re still in something, you’re still in a bubble because you have a body. Right. Right. And so there’s an inherent contradiction there as well, right? Because now you’re rejecting your body in some sense. And that’s what you see happening. Like everybody’s rejecting their body. Very, very strongly. Yeah. I mean, this has got to be the most gnostic society to ever exist. And in such a mass scale, it’s pretty, it’s pretty crazy. Yeah. So I made a comment on Twitter. It’s like if you’re growing without a direction, are you growing? Right. Or can we move forward through this dialectical process if we don’t articulate the positive? You can’t, because we know what growth looks like when it is not directed. Right. It looks like cancer. Or, right, a tree choking itself out because it’s just growing limbs without reaching towards the sun. Right. It’s the reaching towards the sun that provides the organization that makes a healthy tree. Right. Otherwise, it’s like if you were to put lights all around it, it would just start spiraling in on itself and choking itself out. It would lose its ability to gather nutrients. Even that’s a bad example because the other half of the tree is pulling nutrients from the ground. And presumably, that’s still a healthy structure. It’s a lot harder to make that. Well, actually, if you look at like aquaponics, the root structures are quite horrifying. They’re, you know, all tangled balls in a mess. And then they just clog the pipes as they continue to grow because they’re just surrounded by nutrients. There’s nowhere to search. Yeah, there’s no pattern to follow. Right. Right. It’s almost like you’re saying that something like emanation from above is required for organization or something. Right. I don’t know. And from below. Right. The other part is you also need it from below. Right. You cannot grow a tree unless its roots are as deep as its branches are high. Otherwise, it, you know, you blow on it and the whole thing topples over. And that’s maybe the Gnostic problem, right? Or the Tower of Babel problem, right? It’s all up with no roots. And that’s that one is a clear danger of like most religious practices. The head heavy, right? You just keep filling up in here without reaching down into the ground. That’s why you hear things like, you know, God is the highest and the lowest. And the lowest. Right. Yep. Yeah. And then they’re just focused on pure emanation. And Van Diklae did a video on that a while back where he said, you know, this eyes up, eyes down thing. And he says, look, there’s something to the eyes down so you don’t fall in the pit. Right. But you also have to raise your eyes back up. And this gets back to the emergence versus emanation. I think that Gnostics in particular and Vervecky, for example, is all emergence, emergence, emergence is good. Emergence is good. It’s like, ooh, even if you’re controlling emergence, which I argue you can’t fully do anyway, it’s not good. That’s interesting. I never really thought about that. But emergence, its directionality is faced up. Yep. And emanation, the directionality is faced down. It’s almost like in order to have the, actually, no, that makes perfect sense. In order to even have the bravery to look down into the dirt, you need that like endless emanation coming down. That’s what gives you, you know, again, this was like a big part of a experience I had a number of years ago. But it was the whole, you know, I hated the whole thing in Christianity, the original sin, because it just felt totally unjust, just totally like, oh, so I’m fucked right from the beginning and that’s it. You know, like, but that pushing back against that, it was almost like an excuse, a self-defense mechanism, so that I never actually had to acknowledge all the clearly wrong shit that I was constantly doing. You know, it was like trying this really desperate, almost sick attempt to assume innocence where it was not deserved, just because you know, it’s the same thing that we’re doing in the culture, right? It’s look at all your problems, look at what you did to me, so that you never look at what I’m doing. Right? And that’s what the Gnostics appeals to. It’s a psychological projection, too. It ends up projecting. You end up seeing your bad behavior in others, even when it’s not there. And then it’s like, oh, you’re racist. Whenever anybody calls anybody else racist, I go, oh, I know who the racist is. It’s not the person being called racist either. And it’s almost always true. It’s not always true, but it’s almost always true. Like, if it were an even bet, I’d put my money there every time and I’d be a billionaire. So I’m just saying, like, bet whichever way you want, but I don’t live in a perfect world. I’m not trying to get it right all the time. I’ll take most of the time. That’s okay for me. Well, and to finish this little bit, I suppose, about the emanation and the emergent, you could say I was living in a purely emergent frame, trying to escape the weight of my sin by climbing ever higher, right? It’s the escape of responsibility. What it took to acknowledge it was agapic love. It was that pure emanation of agapic love. And then it was easy because I knew I was already loved, right? It didn’t, it wasn’t going to take something from me to acknowledge the wrongs that I had did. That was like the, oh, you know, the, yeah, that’s the mission moment. I mean, it was huge. And then taking responsibility for my sin felt like freedom, not like bondage, which is how I always pictured it would feel, right? But it had to be connected. So it’s like that, that ability to look down was granted to me through the emanation. It was what I was trying to get at. I think, yeah, you’re touching on a bunch of things, right? So first of all, like the submittance, right? Like the bowing down to get out of the cave, right? Like that is a sacrifice if you’re standing on your own feet by your own strength. And so, so, yeah, and that’s resentment in some sense. Just like, why is there some external thing that bows me down? Like I got depressed, like I got incapable. And like now I’m like, okay, like that’s definitely something that makes me bow down, because like I’m smart and I’m supposed to be able to do stuff, and I can’t do stuff. And when you’re there, right, like then you’re like, okay, like humility, like you just have to get to humility, because else you can’t move forward, right? And in some sense, that is the generative aspect of rock bottom, right? Because like what does the humility allow you to do? Well, you can reorient yourself. And so when you’re saying, well, I needed the emanation to look down, it’s like, well, what are you looking down upon, right? Like you, in order to see something, you need to take a vantage point, and that allows you to have discernment, right? So as long as you can take that vantage point and have that discernment, how can you participate in it, right? And I think the naivete is that there’s these patterns, right, like that just drive us, and we just end up in that spirit, right? And like we’re capable of engaging in that spirit, but then we get traumatized and we fill up our cave, right? And I want to take it back to the hydroponics, because like what is this root system that’s going everywhere in the hydroponics? Well, the root system that goes everywhere is engagement with potential, right? But it’s unconstrained potential. It’s not constrained from an emanation, but it’s like there’s an authority in the future that is drawing you without an identity. Like it doesn’t have an identity. Well, maybe it has an identity because like the water is streaming in the pipes, right? So there’s a drag. It’s like, what kind of identity does it have? The wrong identity in that case, right? Oh, I guess well, it’s just as You know, it is the right identity in that context. Context is not natural, right? Like it’s an aberration. And like that’s what all the people are doing, right? Like they’re in their circle. And it’s like, oh, yeah, this circle is giving me an identity. And now I can participate in the world through my identity. And then they they get informed. Actually, and that actually you just defined like a good description of what goes wrong even in proper religions, right? It is the hydroponic system. Well, there’s clearly a direction. There’s clearly a flow. I can flow. I can feel it. Therefore, it must be the right direction. Or a natural environment, right? Or whatever. Yeah, that’s the spirit. Yeah. That’s the problem with Pentecostalism, right? Is that, oh, I can do this. I can feel this. And therefore, it must be correct. But there’s no guiding force from above saying, oh, you shouldn’t pay attention to that stuff. You know, we’re not denying it. It’s fine. But don’t focus on it, right? That’s where the distributed cognition of having a structure can say, well, look, here’s the teaching. The teaching is you don’t stay there. It’s okay to go there because that’s going to happen. But you don’t stay there. You don’t pursue it. You don’t narrow on it. You don’t do the reciprocal narrowing here, right? So something that reciprocally opens and then whatever comes out, you don’t necessarily go and narrow on that. You might want to narrow back to, you know, in meditation, it would be the breath. In Christianity, it would be God. Exactly what happened to me, right? So I had these experiences I was just describing. And then, whoom, they shut down. That narrowing came back in. And I end up in cult four at the end of the… Right? And just like kept driving down and down and down and down. You know? And, yeah. It was extremely destructive. But it was like I felt like I had no other option. You know? Like I did…I was in some sense too shattered by that sudden opening. And then when being cut off from it, you know, this…it’s almost like, you know, lightning strikes a tree and one little branch off of it survives. And then suddenly, you know, it’s cut off from light. And it just becomes this fucking weird, you know, mangled plant. It doesn’t grow correctly. You know, you need that… If something that intense is going to happen, you need that source to foster the regrowth. Yeah, you need that containment in there. And look, I mean, another way to look at it is just to say, look, I tried the first cult and I didn’t learn everything I needed to learn, so I tried the second kind. I needed to do it four times to get it right, man. And you almost did. Almost. The fourth one was the only one I went into fully conscious, though. The rest I just like stumbled upon them. So I think there was something there where it’s like, alright, I keep repeating this situation. How about I do it on purpose instead of on accident? Right. Well, then there’s something to that, right? So you get two narratives. One is you just fell in, fell in, fell in. And the other one is, oh, no, I was moving towards the thing, right? And it’s like both are true. Like in some sense, both are true, right? Because by the time number four, you’re like, oh, I know what this is, but I want to, now that I know what it is, I want to explore it, right? I want to own it. I want to be able to control the emergence. And then what you found out was that you can’t control the emergence, even though you tried and you were smart. You knew what was going on. And you probably knew more about cults than most people will hopefully ever understand about cults in their lives. And that’s not enough. Like it’s still not enough because there’s something going on. No, the knowledge doesn’t do hardly anything. Even as all the patterns are coming up. And I’m like, I know all these patterns. I know they’re unhealthy. I know they’re, you know, these are not the, like, I know, I knew all of it. But when you’re embedded in it, you know, the other part of it is like, we’re not unidirectional creatures or univariable, right? So it’s like, even as my mind is sitting there going, wait, no, something’s off here, something’s off here, the emotional part of myself is like a fucking infant because I never developed it. I spent all my time building towers of knowledge and not like intimately feeling my life. Therefore, it made, it was a vector that was very easy to poke at me with. And it really is, you know, when I look back at that, it’s like I am going through that, you know, it cost a great deal, but I am emotionally a far, far stronger person than I was before it. Because I had to use that part of myself to get out of it. I couldn’t use the tools that I always used before, which was the intellect and the ability to, you know, take a step back and criticize what everyone was doing. That’s how I got out of the first three, right? Is through that method. It didn’t work for the fourth, so I had to figure out a different way out. Oh, that’s a great way to put it. And that goes back to the knowledge engine model, right? We’ve got particular knowledge and intuitive knowledge. And basically, you know, one of the ways to think about the world, right? All maps are wrong, or all models are wrong, some are useful, right? Is to say people aren’t developing their intuition very well. As a result of the loss of the poetic information of the world, right? They’re just ignoring it or whatever. They don’t have access to it because there are no churches pointing up. However you want to frame it, there’s lots of proximal causes we can point to. And because of that, that’s the emotional side of you. Intuition is the thing that puts you in touch with your emotions, right? That’s you with yourself understanding that there’s, you know, and that’s one of the great things about John Favikis work, is that he does go over that in the Cultivating Wisdom course, right? The man, the lion, and the monster sort of thing. It’s like, oh yeah, no, that’s all good work from Plato and those guys, and Aristotle and those guys. That’s all helpful. I think it’s important, too, like, you know, what we call emotional processing, because it’s largely just physical sensations. That’s all emotions really are, is you feel weird, different sensations, like, in your organs. That’s an emotion, right? Like when you panic, right? You feel it in your stomach, right? Love, you feel, or heartbreak, why do we call it heartbreak? Because you literally feel a contraction in your chest, you know? And the point I was trying to make here is just that is like an information superhighway. And that’s, one, what makes it so insanely useful and powerful, and two, what makes it so extremely prone to error, right? Because you can’t keep track of it. You don’t know when something goes wrong, you don’t know why or where it’s coming from, because it’s just such a huge volume of information that’s being transmitted along that highway. Right. Well, and that’s why you need the poetic way of informing the world. Right. Because it has more opportunities to connect things. It helps you train those pathways, and you can feel when they deviate and, right, you build a sense for how those things should flow. But the good news, there’s good news here, Nick, I just, I gotta tell you the good news. So science has in fact validated that if you have a relationship, you know, you’re in love with somebody, and you break up with them, your heart is physically damaged. And the opposite is also true. So good news, science finally figured out something that literally everyone knew. Thank you, science. Great job. It’s awesome. Pretty soon they’ll catch up with something else completely obvious. It’ll be wonderful. I just needed to make that come. And this is why Sokoti says I know I know nothing. That’s why, because the knowledge isn’t that important. You can just feel that. You don’t need this scientific validation from 17 people who ran a study and measured heart cells. A retarded stop. We already need it. We can never stop, we can never stop. I have more good news, Nick. Like, we love you, and now you have your emotional validation as well as your scientific validation. Can I confirm? Yeah, so with the emotions, right, like these emotions, they’re they are really strong currents, right, that move us. But in some sense, we don’t have the framework, right, like we don’t have the structure integrated in ourselves yet that we can relate to it, right? Like, so, because part of it is the emotion itself and what it does with us, right? And part of it is our agency and also another part is how do we interpret the emotion, right? Because, like, I might get frustrated, right, and like that frustration might end up in sadness, like if I don’t perceive I have agency, right, like I feel victimized. If I do perceive I have agency, I’ll be angry, right? So there’s all of these ways that we’re finding these expressions. And I’m just like, well, okay, like, I have anger, right, like, am I going to be Orc Smash or am I going to like lock myself up in a room because I see my inner beast, but I don’t want to tame it, like I need to contain it like a werewolf, right? Like I need to lock myself from civilization. Right. Or do I find a way to be civilized or get bounded by the external world, right? Like have individuals that constrain me or even better, because I’ve been, this is coming up for me so much lately. It’s like when you get offended, right, or someone transgresses against you, you should not defend yourself. Someone else should do that. Because if you’re defending yourself, you’re engaging in that conflict, which is already there. And that’s not constructive. But if someone else defends you, right, like now it’s the proper relationship, right? Because now someone is defending the principle, not the individual interest. And so, yeah, like there’s yeah, there’s a lot of stuff going on with this emotional stuff. There is. Again, to Mark’s point, we’ve lost a lot of the tools that helped us. You know, I mean, this is like probably more the majority of the wisdom that’s been passed down are these types of structures, way more so than like making sure your knowledge is working correctly. That’s also important, but it’s maybe 10 or 15 percent compared to the other the other thing, right? You do need to be able to think properly, right? And that’s like we have formal systems and training to help people learn how to clarify the thoughts so that they’re not making you know, classic blunders like confirmation bias or causation and correlation. And right, there are errors of thoughts that we have made sure to transmit to each other to each new generation so that people can have a better tool set for solving problems. The poetic aspect, I don’t know, it’s there. It’s just I don’t know. It’s also almost alarming how quickly it’s degrading. Like what? A generation, two generations ago, we had Tolkien writing Lord of the Rings and now we have whatever’s happening with like Marvel and you know, considerably worse stories than those. Those are like the high quality ones of our age. Like geez, we’re not like what’s happening? How is it degrading so rapidly? Yeah, it’s bizarre too. So I’ve been on this mission to try to figure out, because people ask me this question, they’re like, you know, look Mark, you know, you didn’t get the Bible even though you went to Catholic school and where’s all this coming from? And I’m like, well, it’s coming from I have no idea. I’m watching I’m rewatching the sci-fi series Andromeda. Andromeda is fantastic. Like, I mean, it’s obviously not where I got all my stuff from, but the reason why I liked it was because not only the philosophy is right there, there’s a race in Andromeda called the Nietzscheans. There’s zero hiding about it. Zero. Nobody’s hiding anything. And each episode begins with a quote. And most of the quotes are like made up, you know, from the the four thousandth and twenty-third lunar cycle on some made up planet. Somebody said they’re silly. And some of them are quite deep. But also when you watch the show, you get this, you get that the way the storytelling is done, the conflicts that come up that can’t be resolved. And I talk about this a lot with the intimacy crisis. See my Andrew with the bangs talk and the talk on navigating patterns with Catherine, right? It can’t be resolved. They have to be accepted. You know, like someone has to die. Is it going to be these people or is it going to be these people? Because that happens all the time in life. You’re faced with these impossible trade-offs. And you know, some people go to, it’s a trolley problem. The trolley problem is made up. You can just ignore it. You don’t have to play that game. But in life, your time, energy, and attention happens to be limited because I’m fairly sure everybody dies. I haven’t proven that yet because I’m still here. But I have good evidence that even I am going to die at some point. And so your time, energy, and attention will be limited. And things are changing and windows are moving. So even if you’re not up against death, it’s like, you know, coupons expire, man, for a reason. Opportunities go away for a reason. Jobs are only open for so long. And Bitcoin is only going to be at $65,000 a coin for a small window, whether it’s may change again, right? But life is all about the movement. It’s not about the state. Everybody keeps focusing in on the state, the state, the state. And this move towards this, you know, forbidden knowledge, right? And privilege is information because in our model, there’s two types of knowledge, not four. Four types of information. So it signals from below, perspectival, processing, and then cooperatively, and then and then cooperative processing between your perspective and the four types of informing, right? And then that results in one of two types of knowledge. But what that means, we’re privileging information. And we’re privileging the wrong type of information. We’re not privileging the type of information that makes multiple connections. It’s poetic information. We seem to be privileging propositional information. And what people don’t remember. We’re privileging the one that’s way easier for us to control. And because it’s easier for us to control, it also has way less of an effect. Right. Right. And it’s diminishing returns because we’re flooded with it, right? Because what people don’t realize, to your point, we can create propositional information all day long. It’s very easy to do. So we have full control over that. But we don’t have the control over the effect. And sometimes we can guess it. Some of the effect, that’s what, when people point at propaganda, that’s what they’re pointing at. I think all propaganda might be hindsight bias. But that’s what they’re pointing at. They’re pointing out, oh, there is an effect of propositions on the humans. Absolutely there is. Right. Because if you can catch the attention and then insert the proposition, that’s definitely going to have an impact on most people. Now I’m disagreeable. So it’s just going to make me hate you. But whatever. It doesn’t matter. Right. So there is an effect. But we can create literally an infinite amount of it. And so there’s no winning that game. Because ultimately there’s just more information out there than you can deal with. And that’s always has to be true. It’s not an opposite. Where we can control. No, you can’t. You can’t. That’s the whole point. You can’t control it. It is already the thing that cannot be controlled before you even start down that path. And that’s where we get messed up. We keep thinking, oh no, no, no. Emergence is good. We can just emerge what we need. Or when emergence comes up, we’ll know the right thing to do. Whether to stomp it down and take people’s powers away on the server. Or let them roam free and do the thing that made the server in the first place. Yeah. You think you’re going to know that, huh? I don’t think you’re right about that assumption that you’re going to know these things. Because some of these things can’t be known. They just have to be tried. And the trying, that exploratory aspect, I think is part of poetic. It’s how you train your poetic. You go, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m an idiot. I’ll build, I’ll smash. But I’m going to go build and smash things. And if they work, I’ll go, yay, good and if they don’t, I’ll go, oh, stupid, try again. To go back to the occult, right? The first card is the fool. Right? And in some sense, it’s inclination into faith where just because you moved into faith does not mean you are going to do the right thing. In some sense, it’s putting yourself in a position where you can learn the most and have the highest quality of information from that learning. You’re getting the best, you’re getting the most feedback. You have the most chance to actually develop wisdom. But it requires that, like, leaving the structures of your knowledge behind. You have to be an idiot. Yeah. So I have three maxims identified that I’m going to promote. These we also identified earlier in the servers. First one is curate your signal. So in some sense, that is pointing at what’s coming at you. Because you are what you eat. And so that’s like the first level of separation and gaining your integrity. And then the second one is don’t identify against, right? That’s one I made up. I’m a complete fan of this. But the identification against is in some sense, it’s more who are you? What is influencing you, right? In some sense, it’s not coming in at you. It’s like you coming out and you’re focusing on one. And then the third one is how are you contributing to the good? And this one, I came up really late and I’m like, why is that so hard? Why couldn’t I have come up with this way earlier? But it’s like, yeah, like whenever you do, and I’m mostly thinking in the thought, right? So like when you get a thought and it’s like, oh, this thought seems really important. Right? Like what’s the question that you ask yourself? How is it contributing to manifesting the good? Right. And then it’s like, oh, yeah, now I can just ignore the thought because like I don’t, I don’t, there’s no way that thought can contribute to the good. I don’t, and like there’s a step beyond that. And like I’ve been having discussions with Ethan about about, well, is this right or is this not right or whatever? And often that’s not the right question to ask. Like, could I be doing something else that is more right? Yes. Okay, go do that. Right? You don’t have to have the argument about whether the thing is right or wrong. It’s like, no, there’s something better. Like, go do the better. Right. Right. And that’s like the it’s an orienting mechanism, right? It doesn’t mean like I have to find the exact thing in that moment in order it’s just you can go, well, there’s something better. How about I do that? Well, there’s something better. How about I do that? And you shift towards it. Right? And it’s a simple process. And it keeps you from bullshitting yourself quite as extravagantly. Which would be It drags you out of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Right. Like, what is the hermeneutics of suspicion? Well, it’s like, oh, I gotta figure this thing that I’m doing out. It’s like, no, there’s the third option which everybody likes, apparently. The third option where there is a participation that’s generative. And this is what fate is, right? Like, fate is the acceptance that being is good, right? Or proper fate, I guess. Like, proper fate is the acceptance that being is good. And the thing that you’re gonna participate in that’s the thing that you haven’t analyzed is gonna manifest the good as a consequence of your participation. Right. When you’re in that state, you are not obstructed. When you find an obstacle, right, like, instead of sitting down and getting upset, you move around. And that living like that and, yeah, just this simple heuristic. And for some reason it’s so hard. And like, it’s also really hard to realize that it is an option. And it’s also really hard to see that the thoughts whatever they are, right, like whether it’s like, oh, I have a pain in my finger, right? Like, should I check it out? What it exactly is? No. Like, I shouldn’t pay attention to the pain in my finger. Like, there’s a better way for me to participate and like, if it’s really bad, it will call again, right? Like, it got the hotline to my brain. I hope so. Yeah, no, I think that’s great. It’s such a simple way to form a practice. And, I mean, it’s such a, yeah, just a basic question that’s able to just reconfigure how we are conceptualizing the issues we face. The image I had, too, was like, when you said, you know, oh, you hit a wall and you just move around it, I again thought of like the tunnel. And it’s, in some sense, you know, you can’t afford to leave the wall there in a cave because you need that space. The tunnel, right, you flow around it, and then maybe one day you look back and you realize that the wall just fell over from everything flowing around it, you know? That slow, that erosion of it, and then it just gets flushed away. It’s but having that resilience to just be like, I can just keep moving here. I don’t have to stop. I don’t have to make this the, you know, the thing, the hill to die on. And most likely, it’ll actually be more effective at removing it if I do just flow around it. Now, you have to be careful with that concept because what you’ll see a lot in the new age is like what they call spiritual bypassing or emotional bypassing. That’s like the, you know, just stay happy all the time. And, you know, if anything bad comes up, just ignore it and then be happy again and it’ll all fix itself. And I don’t think that works, but they’re… See, again, you always run into the problem of like wisdom. It’s like everything works if you have wisdom to do it with, right? Yeah, wisdom is the thing that tells you when to apply what tool. Right. And even like, how do you get around that obstacle? Right? If you accept the this type of motion, what’s the thing that answers the question, what’s better? You know, like, that’s your wisdom that’s coming in. It’s right. It’s trained at having dealt with any innumerable number of different shapes. And that’s where the danger is. It’s like, again, you get to this situation where you’re like, oh, none of it quite works without wisdom. Because I’ve seen plenty of people ask a question similar and end up in quite horrifying places. I like this idea of Haven here, right? So instead of lifting the rock or the wall up and deconstructing it effectively because like that’s actually appropriate because I think that’s literally what we’re trying to do. To deconstructing the wall. You lift yourself up. Right? And then you can look down. You can take an overview and then you can descend. So instead of projecting the problem onto the world, you project the problem on you as an agent. Right? And your participation. And yeah, like there’s times where you need to enforce the law. Right? Like I’m, people don’t like that about me, but like I call people out on stuff all the time. Right? And not because I want to be an asshole, but like for two reasons. One is you’re in a relationship with me. And you’ve just troubled the waters. Right? So now we need to clear the waters before we can go on. We can go on without clearing the waters. But like then we lose intimacy. Right? And people don’t realize that. And the other part is like it’s not good for you if like you’re leveling troubled waters. Like I see that there’s a speck in your eye. You should listen to me that I see a speck in your eye. And like you can complain about the logs in my eye all day long. But like, yeah, like call me out and I’ll fix them. Right? Like And a lot of it just depends on like even that. You know, it’s a technique I find myself often using is that I’ll call the log out in my eye to call the speck out in someone else’s eye and hope that they realize that it’s, you know, that thing. It’s like, especially if they’re already in a projected mindset, it’s way easier to go like, yeah, you see that? Well, you know. It’s like monkeys like fleeing each other’s backs. Like, yeah, I can’t touch my back. I can drive but I can’t touch them. Right. That’s very true. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think too, you know, the other part of John’s work that’s really important is he talks about spiritual bypass. Yeah. And that’s really important because people and talks about distributed cognition. That’s really important. I like the way Vanderklaat does it better, right? With you outsource your sanity to others. Yeah, that’s your distributed cognition, man. Like, that’s really important to know. And they’re both important concepts. But also, yeah, the missing part is there’s emotional bypass where you’re ignoring a problem that you shouldn’t be ignoring. And there is that sense of, you know, when you’re doing that, you’re separating, right? This is that loss of intimacy that Manuel was talking about. You’re separating yourself from something. Right. Could be you from yourself. Could be you from others. It could be you from nature, right? It could be any of those phrases. Most likely all of them. Most likely all of them. Yeah. More likely all of them. Right. But, but more directly, it’s one of them primarily and the other two kind of follow because, you know, and, yeah, I mean, we can go right into, well, that looks like the Trinity. Yeah, looks like the Trinity to me too. So what? Triangles confirmed. Plato was already there, guys. Pythagoras was there before him. So it’s all triangles all the way. But that’s the re-enchantment of the world. We talk about the flattening of the world. We’re talking about ignoring the pyramid and thinking that it’s a flat surface instead of acknowledging, no, no, there’s something higher and there’s less of that higher thing. And so you’re more likely to hang out at the bottom where things are not great. And if you don’t struggle towards the top, you’re just going to hang out at the bottom forever. And that’s why you need Plato’s cave to have three parts. Ironically, the world only looks flat when you’re looking at it from a very great height. Yeah. Right. When you’re looking down at it. I think the world also looks flat if you look at it when your face is on the ground. Wow, that’s awesome. Well, what’s a great height? Because again, we are standing in the middle between the ethereal realm and the material realm, and we’re meeting reality together. We’re co-manifesting reality. And so at that point, everything below us is emergent. Everything. Right. And if you’re only looking this way and down, across and down, everything is emergent and emergence is good all by itself. And you don’t need any help. And oh, by the way, now you’ve got the science tool and science tells you, although science is lying about this for sure, that you can control all that. And you can’t. And the more control you want, the more detail you have to have. And the more detail you have, the more overwhelmed you get. And then when you’re overwhelmed, you’re not going to be able to control it anymore. And you’re going to be able to control it. And so you’re going to be able to control it more. And then the more you get into the realm, now you have a different problem. You have the right information for the control, but you can’t manage it anymore. And so there’s a trade-off between how much information you can get and how much information you can manage. And that’s physical things too. Which is also exactly what an emergent world view would tell you. No matter how many of the variables you’re counting. Right. And science is finding exceptions to that and pointing at them only. And so all of science is a bias for, it’s automatically biased, it’s stated, oh, it has to be a testable hypothesis. Great! So the filter for something be in science. The boundary of science is testable hypothesis. Fair. Fair. That’s fine. I have no problem with that. But that means science can’t understand all the things that aren’t testable. And maybe there are way more things that aren’t testable. In fact, I can prove to you mathematically that this has to be true. There are way more things that aren’t testable than aren’t testable. And therefore, science can’t know most of the world. Forget about all of the world. We can’t know most of the world. It’s not possible mathematically. And the math, to your point, if you took your stupid emergent point seriously and actually bothered to take pen to paper, because it doesn’t take a computer to do this, you would realize this immediately. It would be abundantly clear to you that there’s a problem here. It’s Zeno’s paradox, isn’t it? Like fundamentally, it’s… That’s what I think Zeno’s paradox is, Nick. I think that the ancient Greeks used paradox to show you the limits of your thinking. In other words, if you’re stuck in a paradox, that means that your worldview is not open enough to the rest of the world. And so you can’t actually use that. I mean, Zeno’s paradox basically says that in the scientific or materialistic frame, you can’t move. You can’t reach a goal. You can’t move. You can’t reach a goal. You can never reach the wall. And I did want to address this really quickly. So do you guys have any thoughts on Thomas Kuhn’s subsequent developments in philosophy of science? Yes. There’s no such thing as a philosophy of science. That makes absolutely no sense. Science is a philosophy, according to the ancient Greeks. And that’s just… You can’t flip it around because you feel like equality and binary thinking are valid ways of dealing with the world. There’s no such thing as philosophy of science. There never will be. There never can be. It’s a ridiculous idea. They need to stop that nonsense and realize that philosophy is the handmaiden of religion. And if you want to know where any philosophy comes from and science is natural philosophy, then you need to look to the religion. And it’s that simple. It is a two worlds mythology. Sorry, John Vervicki. It’s a two worlds mythology, buddy. And reality is the third thing created from the gap between the two worlds being knitted together by us. It’s a real simple model, guys. It’s not hard. Anyway, sorry. Done, Randy. So your point there was basically saying the philosophy of science is the same as saying the philosophy of philosophy. Yes. And once you’ve entered that recursion, you are right. Now you need a philosophy of philosophy of philosophy. And… I was going to say that because when you have this emergence thing, right, like the thing emerges, right, and now we have an interaction with it, right? We observe it. Now we account for it, right? So now we create a third thing, which is our relationship to the emergence. And so, yeah, you’re in this recursive loop, right? And I think this is what’s happening in the economic systems, for example, right? So we’re having a basic economic theory, right? And now we have a market, right? And now we have futures in the market, right? And so there’s a dynamic that is relating to the basic reality effectively, right? Because economics is like a reflection of what happens in the world in some sense. And now there’s something built upon that, right? And then they make systems that relate to the system that relate to the system that relate to the system. And at a certain point, it’s just fantasy. Well, we all know how successful our theories of economics are, so. Yeah, Taleb talks about that. Read all Nassim Taleb’s books. He’s pretty clear on the fraud of the idea of economics in general, with very few exceptions. Yeah, well, yeah. And then you enter thermodynamics systems, which is really just that’s you know, well, you’re bumping up into one of the limits of knowledge itself, the variables multiply to infinity. Well, the interesting thing about thermodynamics, at least the way that I learned it, right? Like you had a bunch of categories, right? So you had temperature, right, which is expressive of the movement within a system, and then you have pressure, which is related to the engagement with the walls effectively, right? And then the boundary. Yeah. So there’s all of these things that are, well, effectively constraints that are somewhat absolute, right? And then you have an interaction with them, right? And now you can say, well, like if I keep this constraint constant and this constraint constant, then these other constraints, right? And then strange things happen, right? Because like when you have a gas and you change the pressure, right? Like the way that the pressure affects the way that the gas is manifesting changes over the pressure, right? And so you get these strange graphs of these interactions between all of these factors. But that’s a limited variable system, right? Like that. Yeah. It’s actually a very I mean, this is for Reiki’s combinatorial explosion, right? It’s the whole point of pointing it out is just a seemingly extremely simple system becomes extraordinarily complex very quickly. I mean, to your point, you know, you can almost think of all of thermodynamics is just a big vector map, right? All you really need to know is the speed and direction of a thing. That’s it. But suddenly you have to know the speed and direction of the gas, which is trillions, at least, little dots of vectors. And now all of a sudden, even though you only have two variables, right? Speed and direction, the mapping of it becomes literally impossible to perform, even in a very simple system. And if you start changing these variables, you start putting that into graphs. So now you have this multidimensional graph, right? So how do you present that to yourself? How do you get intelligibility? There’s this point where three lines come together instead of one line going forward. That’s this special point. And then you can say something about the point. But that’s about as useful as you can get. Right. That’s our relevance realization hardware running. It can’t keep up. There’s no actual piece of information that’s more relevant than any other in that understanding the system. So what it starts trying to do is just looking for anomalies, right? And then hyper focuses on the anomaly just because it’s the only thing that stands out in the system. And then it binds itself into the anomaly as if that information is more special, even though it’s irrelevant when it comes to understanding the system that you are trying to interpret. That’s long, but well said. Yeah. Yeah, it is and it is the ultimate problem. The ultimate problem is this more information problem doesn’t go away. It only gets worse. And it’s really just the speed of the potential. This is the conspiracy theory. This is what it is, right? The constant searching of the anomaly and the pattern. And when you see it, you think oh, it must be there must be meaning here. There has to be a thing. Right. If you don’t have amination to provide the meaning. Right. Right. Well, it’s the assumption of rationality. Right. Because look, what we’re doing to people and we shouldn’t be doing this at all like nobody should ever do this. We’re telling that they’re rational. That’s line number one. And then because they’re rational everything else must be rational. And because we can point out some rationality like these economists, you know they make some really good connections, right? They’re just wrong. Well, the whole Bitcoin thing. It’s the front mix as well makes some really good connections. Yeah. Yeah. Well, all Bitcoin theory was. Well, Bitcoin is priced against the dollar. And it’s like, no, it’s not. Like, where did you get that from? Bitcoin’s priced against electricity. And I have a video on this. I’m navigating patterns. Bitcoin priced against electricity and compute power. That’s what it’s priced against. It’s not priced against the dollar. No connection to the dollar whatsoever. What are you talking about? You’re a lunatic. Right. And then some event comes along, right? Like a war. Right. And then fear rises. Okay. All currencies, all types of currencies, all possible conceptions of currency, all possible conceptions of trade of any type are going to go down in value when uncertainty goes up. Uncertainty goes up. They’re going that’s going to happen. Because currency, and I have a video on this too on my channel, right? Currency is all about the value of your potential in the future. That’s what currency represents. To some extent, all trade represents that. But currency in particular represents that more purely. And if you don’t understand any of that, you’re going to be like, oh, no, no, it’s rational. And I’m a rational being. So I can understand the rationality behind this. And then, of course, if you don’t know enough basic psychology, I call it, not this rat’s nest of modern psychology, then you won’t understand. Oh, fear means that people are going to have a different attitude towards trade and cooperation. There’s a deep irony here as well in that what we are accounting for with currency is potential in the future, except that the only way we can put a number to it, the only way we can actually account it is as debt. Yes. Right. That’s what the potential of the future is counted in, is what is owed. It’s really bizarre. There’s like a sneaky little flip there, which is probably one of many reasons that currencies are so volatile. It is interesting to think, too, like when you have large scale events, you couldn’t even actually see the change of a currency’s value. Like you literally can’t see it. If all of it rises or shrinks, that what, you know, yes, you can still compare it to how another currency is doing, but if all of them dropped or all of them jumped, you would actually, it’s totally invisible to you. Right? That’s like the fish in the water problem. Yes. Yeah, it’s exactly that. It’s horrible. Yeah. Currency, yeah. Money’s a weird one. Fun one. Yeah. But a weird one. Well, and because we don’t understand the core concept, but then you think you can. And I’m like, I don’t think I can understand that. I don’t. Here’s an interesting point, too. So, right, you’re warned against worshipping mammon, right? You must choose a master. And if we then view currency, we’ll assume mammon was what was, you know, currency was at least representative of what was being referenced with that word. In some sense, you get this vision of like a call against Peter Pan-ism, right? Worshiping potential as potential. Right? There’s And then that connects back to a world of only the emergent. Right? And so, am I jumping too quickly through here? Do you see how these things are connected to each other? So we just said, okay, currency is an accounting of potential, granted it’s done in debt. So it’s looking over its shoulder at what the potential of the future is. Then you have worship not mammon. So now it’s worship not the potential of the future. Right? Which is an interesting call. And then you have what does a purely emergent worldview, what does the world look like from a purely emergent worldview? Right? It’s in some deep sense always expanding into potential. That’s what you’re So, right? The emergent is a point. It’s a focus. It’s the thing in the distance towards which you, right? It has a closing aspect to it. Yeah, yeah. But there’s also you can only relate to the actual. Right? If you have emergents only. Because you can only see the things that you’ve seen before. Yeah. Well, wait. Well, and that’s the problem. When you come across an exception to that rule, we’ll call it, just for the sake of brevity, then you say well, why should Steve Jobs make so much money off the iPhone when he was just one person? Right? I mean, this is the labor theory of value stuff. Where you average out labor. Anybody who’s worked a labor job knows you can’t average out labor. That’s not a valid way to think about it. Then you end up with these weird anomalies. Like, well, he didn’t do anything special. It’s like, no, no, no. You don’t understand. Nothing happens without him. Nothing. It’s not inevitable. It’s not inevitable. It’s not some rational process that’s unfolding through time that somebody somewhere would have eventually invented that fault. That’s not true. That is provably false. Now, it could have happened, but it’s provably false that it was inevitable. Because there’s just potential out there. And this is what we have a hard time relating to. That’s why we like the certainty. But we only have that hard time relating to it because we’ve lost the skills. And this goes back to my argument on that I’ve made many times about the education system. And there’s some article out there somewhere, I swear I’m going to find it, where this woman pulled together a bunch of studies and said, look, if you go to an education system that looks like first grade, where you have desks and you’re doing propositional learning and the standard stuff, which I call training. I have a video on education versus training. If you do that, say, in kindergarten or worse yet in pre-kindergarten, your outcomes for everything else are worse. In other words, the more propositional you train somebody early on and the earlier you train them propositionally, the worse all of their outcomes are. Like their IQ is actually lower on average. Like they’re unable to grasp concepts, right? Because there’s this participatory knowing, to give John his due, that you need to go through first for a long time so that you learn how to explore the world and deal with potential. And if you don’t learn, you’re screwed. Right? It’s learning how to learn is what you need to do first. Yes. Well, that’s proper education. Right. Well, in my video on training versus education or education versus training, whichever way I put the title, right? That’s what I say. I say proper education is learning to learn. And what we’re doing to kids is training. Because there’s a standard and there’s a grading system. And it’s not that they took religion out of schools. They did that. It’s that they took religion, some gym, some recess, some art, and some music out of schools. So it’s not an assault on merely religion. It’s an assault on participation with others in the world. It’s an assault on learning itself. It’s an assault on education. It’s an attempt to some extent, and I don’t think it’s deliberate, so I don’t want to feed conspiracy theory, but it’s an attempt to create crimes in a machine. And if you think, if you feel that way, it’s probably because it happened to you. And the way out is not more of the same. And one of the problems with the postmoderns is that, you know, oh, it’s all power. Right. But they don’t give you a way out of that. What they say is it’s all power, therefore the power should change. It’s like, you haven’t fixed the problem, dude. What are you talking about? It’s all power, so I need to win. Right. This is a point that… At a certain point, I was like, I need to learn how to learn. Please someone tell me how to learn. And nobody knows. Nobody knows how to learn. Like, dude. I got very lucky in that regard. I went to a charter school where everything was self-directed learning. There was no classes. You went to school for two hours a day. You’d pick a subject that you were interested in, and then you were called to use the classic, you know, disciplines, math, science, literature, to analyze the thing that you were interested in. So you used them like lenses to investigate something that you wanted to know more about. And most kids did miserably at that school. It was not enough structure, and they were already programmed. They had already lost their curiosity. That’s really what it was. And so it was just like the perfect excuse to like, oh, I go to school for two hours a day? Well, fuck it. I’m going to go, you know, do the things that are fun to do. And, you know, hell, who knows. Maybe that was good for them. But for me, it let me just like, whew, I had a great time. I taught myself calculus in 10th grade by reading the textbook and doing all the problems in it. You know, like it was I was allowed to actually let my curiosity about the things I wanted to know flow. So Montessori is like a halfway house in that, right? So Montessori is trying to have some participatory elements, right? So they have like, for example, the maps, and then you can take out the countries, right? And then you have to draw around them and then you have to learn them by heart, right? And so there’s this interactivity and there’s this affordance for generating your own learning style. But like you said, right? Like you’re slotting into a system, right? So if you have an affinity for that system, that’s amazing. But like if you don’t have an affinity for that system, like it doesn’t mean that you can’t participate in it, but now you need different guidance, right? Like I think the principle there is also that you help each other, right? So like you don’t go to the teacher, you go to your classmates for advice, which is amazing, right? But then like does the classmate actually help you? Do they know how to help you? Right? So there’s sometimes like that’s a miracle, right? Like you find this coming together of things that like the teacher couldn’t have provided, right? But other times it’s a disaster. It’s a complete disaster. Yeah, like so if you’re asking me like how do you run a class like that? Well, like that requires higher skill, right? Like it requires you to be able to participate on different levels and have observation and then not be overwhelmed. But then you also need to do the testing and stuff like that. But that’s the problem, right? Because the real problem is we have before that the parents have already, you know, done the helicopter thing or the snowplow thing or whatever metaphor you want to use. And so the kids aren’t used to exploring and making mistakes and having to solve their own problems anymore, right? And look, you know, it’s the classic, you know, devouring mother thing that Peter Syntaxx is why it resonates so well. It’s like yeah, you weren’t allowed to make mistakes and now you can’t learn. Or the tyrannical father. Everything you should accept through fiat, right? Not through exploration. I’m not going to explain to you why this is happening. I’m just going to tell you now follow it. Right. The two aspects. Right? Right. Or let you learn on your own. And it’s too much order, right? Too much order on the feminine side, too much order on the masculine side. Yeah, fair enough. Like, and that happened that probably happened to you to some extent. But then it doesn’t matter if you go to Montessori School. Like it makes no difference because you already don’t know how to explore. And so all you’re going to do is try to be safe all the time. And then that’s going to be a big problem. Like a really big problem. And people don’t realize that. Like we, I think, you know, like Dr. Spock, I guess, was the author in the 60s or 70s or whatever with that How to Raise Your Children garbage, you know, psychology garbage book. And it’s no good. Wait, is that where the self-esteem movement came from? Maybe. I don’t remember if it’s that one. I’m pretty sure there was a parenting book either like I don’t know, probably in the 80s, mid to late 80s. And that’s, I mean, it’s largely responsible for the whole self-esteem motion of like the 90s, which is what I grew up in. And then, you know, that’s as toxic as toxic gets. Yeah, might be like one of the predecessors from 4SAL. Yeah. I don’t remember. I have yet to look into parenting information. You should. I should. You gotta figure all that out, man. Yeah. And just, you know, I think that we’re built in to know this stuff. Right. And so how much do we need to rely on propositional knowledge? That’s the real question. That’s yeah. That’s the other part of it. I have I don’t know. I have a yeah, I don’t know. It’s tricky. It’s one of those things I probably won’t know until I’m actually doing it. And then I’ll think all of, you know, have had it figured out and end up with a child that, you know, nothing I do is the proper fit. And then it’s like, oh, okay, never mind. Often how life goes. Yeah. Well, like, I don’t think you should look for the fit. I think what we want to do is we want to attend to the attention of others. Right. And if we don’t look for the fit, then we can’t do that. And then we can do the attention of others. And if we’re attending to the attention of others, then we can guide that attention to things that are good. And I think that’s what parenting is. Like give people ways in and ways through. And then they will find their own path. Yeah. Very true. Yeah. Set up the container. Yes. Good things can come from emergence. Right. The odds of good things coming from emergence are remarkably small. Right. And they increase only when you provide a container. So the container comes first and the emergence comes after that. Right. So first you have to plant a flag. Then you have to build a structure. Then the emergence happens. And that’s it. Yeah. And so now you’re quoting Genesis. Yeah. I’m going to complexify it a little bit because this is the way that I’m going to organize my practices. So I want to do it in a group. Because we’re social beings. So we need a group container. And I think this is what saying a prayer is. Like when you say we get it here together to do this or whatever. Please guide us in right action. That we may not sin. Right. It’s bringing our attention to, okay, we’re participating in this activity. We can do it wrong. We can do it right. And then the next step that I want to take, right, it’s like what is your personal intention within the container. Right. Because like you’re having a role. Right. Like you’re being educated. But what is the aspect of yourself that needs attention. Right. Like how do you engage in a relationship so that you can be growing in that aspect of yourself. Right. Because if you’re not looking at it, right, like you’re not going to have the relation. You’re not going to have the interaction that you’re looking for. So that’s the two things. So in some sense, what is the container? That’s what emanates. Right. That’s the thing that’s shared. Like in some sense, it’s the idealist conception. Right. Like we’re having the idea and we’re participating in the idea. Right. And then I am emerging into it. Right. Like I’m emerging I’m being informed into the shape. Right. Like so what is the identity that I have to take that I can participate in the emergence correctly. Right. Right. Like that’s universal. Right. Like so like can you do that for children? No, because they can’t understand this language. Can you do this for adults? Well, I don’t know if they can have a participatory understanding of what I just said. Like I I’m actually highly doubtful that many people can do that. Right. But they can do the prayer. Right. And then, well, is there other ways where you can do that? Well, like there’s ways where you can do that. Right. Like what do children do? Right. Like children they’re attracted by new things. Which is by the way a cancer that’s going on in our culture. Right. We’re still children attracted by new things all the time. Instead of that we take the things that are trusted and good for us. So potential. Yeah. But yeah, no, it is potential. Right. The world of Peter Pan’s. Right. Right. Right. And I’m just as guilty of being honest. So how do you engage with a child? Well, you use them. Right. It’s like, okay, like you want potential. I’ll find a way for you to have participation in this thing. Right. And I’ll make you recognize the potential. And like that’s just what you keep doing. And then you’re going to shape yeah, like I don’t know what it’s called in English where you have these things on the side of the horse’s eyes. Right. Blinders. Yeah. So you’re going to have them create their own blinders because that’s the way that you limit the combinatorial explosion. If you can get your kid to have their blinders towards ice cream and only engage with ice cream when you present it to them, then you did a good job. Right. Yeah. Well, and that’s really the problem. Right. So one of the things people say like, oh, we’re going to get everybody to listen to the 50 Hours Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series. And I was like, no, that’s insane. First of all, some of it’s wrong. Second of all, like most people can’t understand it. Third of all, it’s harder than a college course. Like actually, it’s demonstrably harder than 90 percent of college courses. Just that lecture series. So you got to sit and take notes and do all this college level work. There’s a lot of people that can’t do college level work. And some of them have degrees, unfortunately, for the rest of us. And then the real utility though in John’s work is in developing tools like Manuel’s and I are doing. Right. Around practices and ways to understand what’s wrong. Right. So we have a video on the Faith Crisis, the Crisis of Faith versus the Meaning Crisis because those are two different things. Right. So we’ve talked about that in a few places and developing tools and understandings for the differences between those two things. And like, why are the Christians doing dumb things that don’t work? Why can’t they be effective as effective as Jordan Peterson? Well, because Peterson is doing something they don’t understand because they have a framework of Christianity and they can’t see what he’s doing because they’re bumping up against the edge of their aquarium. Right. And then it’s like, well, it must be political. It’s no one. It’s not political either. Right. It’s like, oh, it’s not religious. It’s not Christian and it’s not political. Nope. It’s neither of those things. And it’s like, oh, no. Right. They can’t understand it. But for Vakey’s work, it gives you a way, a science of meaning. Right. So now you have a way to go and build tools. And we’ve been doing that. So that’s good. Aside from just running practices. We’ve been building tools and we’ve been coming up with understandings and we’ve been able to use that language and those understandings to explain things to people and get them unstuck. Because knowing that people are stuck and knowing where they’re stuck is really important. And then you can help them better and more effectively. And that’s what Vakey’s work is really good for. To give it to the average playabout there, no freaking way. You know, there’s a lot of stuff that it’s hard to follow. And just because you follow it doesn’t mean it’s going to lead anywhere. I mean, that server never coalesced around his work. Right. It never did. Even with a lot of help, although it had help in being destroyed when we had some momentum. There’s a constant fear of the hyper-abstract too, is that it’s just another playground where you can just… It’s a fantasy. You can live in that fantasy. And you can feel like you’re actually doing something without ever doing anything at all. It’s… Spiritual bypass. Right. It’s a big problem. Right. So I want to bring it back to the cults and the narcissism and stuff, right? So… I’ll be right back. Give me like two minutes. Okay. So it’s interesting that we’re living in a world where we can see these patterns, right? And then James Lindley made a couple of really amazing videos where he’s… Yeah. I don’t fully agree with the framing, but he’s making correct observations. And he’s making connections where you can get a sense of the intelligibility of these gnostic aspects in culture, right? So they’re percolating, right? They’re emerging. And I think Mark really wanted to pay attention to the patterns, right? They’re like necessary patterns. So if you’re… Well, like Nick was talking about how he was having to deal with the original sin and how it is really hard for him to accept that he had to live under that constraint, well, getting to that acceptance, right? Like if you reject that, right? Like you end up in a gnostic frame, right? Because now you’ve got a justification for wailing against being effectively, right? And then you got to say, well, no, it has to be different. Like I have to set an ideal. I’m going to have to manifest that ideal even though I can’t justify it by any standard, right? Like I’m going to be the standard by which I’m going to judge things in the world. And so when we’re in that framing and we see this pattern happening and it happens on all places, right? Like it happens in the climate realm. It happens in the race realm. It happens in the economics realm, right? Like there’s all of this idealism. We’re going to create the structure and then the structure will like make everything better and everything will be okay. And so we see people acting out that pattern, right? We’ve identified that there’s a fundamental resentment in some sense that’s laying at the groundwork of that because a hermeneutics of suspicion, at least two things that exist outside of their framework, right? Like outside of their source role circle that are people that are trying to distract you from your cause, right? These people, they don’t have the right forbidden knowledge, right? Like they don’t have the understanding of the true workings of the world. And yeah, so we have an ideal world, right? We can identify these people. So what do we do about them? How do you engage with that? I think James Lindsay said don’t fall into the trap, right? So the big trap is that they come in. They present you with their framing, right? Like, okay, this is what’s going on, right? So they set up the arena and then they present the problem in the arena, right? So they do two things, right? They define the ground that you’re standing on and they define the relationship that you have upon that ground. And so yeah, he said don’t accept that. I’m totally on board. Like don’t use the tools of your enemies, like Peterson made that claim. This is maybe a better way of understanding that, what the tools of your enemies are, right? Like they show you the world in a certain light. And so you’re the answer to that is you’re going to have to come with an alternative, right? So I guess we can basically set two situations, right? Like one is when such a person is coming from a dominant position, right? And like so if you’re in a group of other people where the group is effectively already set on doing something, I think maybe the best thing that you can do is just run and find a better group because like yeah, that’s going to be a rough battle and I don’t think you’re going to win. And so the more interesting position is someone who’s been captured by another wizard effectively, right? And is trying to express that vision of the world in a new group, right? As a newcomer, right? Like this is the problem with migration, right? Like migration comes into a place and they present a new way of being, right? And the new way of being is in conflict with the existing order in some sense, right? And so there’s traditional ways of dealing with the new but I think in this case it’s not the new from the outside, it’s a new from a corruption of the inside. So yeah, how do we think about that? So I mean at some point you’re just talking about the inability to integrate newness into the, into you, right? Sure. Yeah, well I mean I would say yeah, that’s the loss of poetic information. Like that’s what the, that’s the poetic information is the thing that allows you to participate correctly with something. And so if your participation can’t be correct because your poetic information is not available to you or you’re not acknowledging it or you’re not skilled at dealing with it, then you’re never going to have true participation or right participation or right relationship. And since the world is relationship and it’s not a world of objective objects we’ll say you’re going to run into problems. Now a lot of those problems can be gotten around by having society around you, etc, etc. But ultimately the Gnosticism is going to tell you that everything that disagrees with your subjective experience, your phenomenological experience, is wrong. And the only thing preventing you is the thing outside you preventing you from knowing the knowledge, right? And that’s where we get stuck because you know, we just don’t have the ability to integrate or the ability to accept because sometimes you can integrate and sometimes you have to accept that, you know, look I’m never going to be a fighter pilot. I have to accept that. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. And it’s not like it never could have happened. But that’s a different statement. We’re squishing time. There’s no such thing as the past, the future and the present. We keep squishing time down to, well I could have been a great fighter pilot and I only go into fighter pilot school and make a decision. Yeah, but you didn’t. So it doesn’t matter. It’s already gone, right? And we tell people things like you can be anything you want to be. No, no, no. You can be anything you want to be at the exclusion of all the other things that you want to be. That’s what you can be. It’s a filter, right? You have to exclude a bunch of stuff in order to quote, be whatever you want to be. And we don’t tell people that. We don’t tell them it’s a trade-off. We just pretend like there’s no trade-off. You can have what you want. It’s like no, you can’t. Yeah. I mean, I can speak from experience as a person. Followed perhaps ill-begotten dreams further than most. It all is work. Like the whole myth of like if you find the perfect thing and every day you wake up and you enjoy what you… No, you fucking don’t. That’s a bunch of fucking bullshit. I have to sit there sanding a knife for eight hours of, you know, my fingers and joints are screaming just repetitive motion. You know, like I’m not going to say it’s a motion. You know, like it’s work. It’s work. It sucks. Now, it is satisfying at the end. And certainly there are things I could be doing that would be way less satisfying. So there’s a hint of truth to it. But it’s, I think, really poisonous that there’s an inclination to describe a life that does not require you doing things you hate doing. You know, it should be automatic in there. Like, hey, you’re good at this. You know, maybe you should probably pursue it. But it’s going to suck also. And that’s okay. It’s, you know, like that’s okay. Yeah, I… It’s so long. And there’s a way to value, you know, because the other part is like people have lost the sense of value that even just like my parents offered. Which is, they did something they fucking hated to make sure I could have a decent life. And good for them. That costs so much. That costs so much. And they’re not like, I don’t know, we’ve lost the ability or we’re losing the ability to value those people. And what they offered and where their priorities were placed. Because it’s the same thing as the knives. Yes, I feel great when it’s all done. It lasts for about three days until I’m like, okay, chuck it and let’s get to work on the next thing, right? It’s a brief high of like realizing your creativity. But, you know, when I look at how my parents live their life, it’s like, well, where was their creativity operating? Well, it wasn’t moving brown boxes from point A to point B for fucking 10 hours a day. There’s nothing there. There’s nothing there. But they’re still being fed. They were being fed on offering something to me, to their children, to their people around them. Right. And that is a far greater creative endeavor than fucking making knives or whatever your little drawing pictures. Like, who gives a fuck? Come on. Re-calibrating what we think of as a creative endeavor and where the meaning is coming from. It’s not coming from all work is work. It has to be connected to the things that actually have value. And creativity by itself has no value. Right. The thing, right, the value is in the sacrifice. The value isn’t anywhere else. And that’s the people are like, well, I want to do something without sacrifice. All right. Whatever that is, is going to have no value. Period. End of statement. If you want to do something valuable, you have to sacrifice. Does it have to be all sacrifice? No. But you have to sacrifice. And then you get into this whole thing of, you know, because I’ve seen this before. Oh, my mother had to stay home and she never got to pursue her dreams until I was older. And now she’s too old to pursue her dreams correctly of being whatever she wanted to be. Right. It’s like, yeah, but otherwise you don’t live. Right. Is that the trade off you want to make? And then there’s abortion. It’s like, well, yeah, they do. You want to sacrifice the entire future for your own self-interest. Your own pleasure in the moment. That’s what you want to do. That’s what you’re saying. And that’s why when people ask me, do you support this? I go no, I don’t. I don’t. I value sacrifice. If you did a deed and something happened and there’s results of that. Who’s sacrifice do you value though? Okay. Here’s what’s super weird that just. So we live in the world of Peter Pan’s right where potential is valued at way too high a premium. And yet we also live in the same world that cuts off the largest source of potential, which is the child, the next generation, the next creation. It’s such a conundrum. Why are these things, how are these things combined? I can do that easily. I actually wrote a thing on Vanderclay’s video that actually goes into this. So what’s the progression? And this is, I think it’s literally an axis. But like just a general progression of awareness of humans. So you start with identifying with yourself. You’re an entity in the world. So you need to take care of yourself. And at a certain point you’re in a family. So you have to identify with the social aspect. So in some sense that’s a draw out of your egoic frame. It’s a really basic, but natural drawing outside of your egoic frame into a cooperative frame. And then you can expand that to your tribe. And like in the Bible it goes to Israel. Like a thing that you can’t have a relationship to. So now it becomes like an abstract. But it is an abstract that is unified within the identity of the tribe. Like there’s a shared standard that is upholding this unification. What also happens? Well there’s an extension across time. So when you start identifying with the next generation, like with your children’s children, the other way as well, like with your previous parents. Now what are you going to value? Like what is going to be an authority upon you? Well it’s going to be principles that allow you to sustain over longer periods of time. These principles are going to be your guides. They’re what’s going to get you through the desert. But how do these principles look? Well these principles are going to be unique to you. And they’re going to be localized. They’re going to be specific aspects. Because you only have access to the limited intelligibility. Now you get the gods. You get multiple of them. And you’re going to need this one in this situation. You’re going to need this one in the other situation. So you kind of need to appease both of them. You can make whatever system you want. And then I think the thing that happened within Christianity, or in monotheism as such, is not only we have an expansion in time, but now we also have an expansion in co-identification across humanity. So you’re still in a tribe that is in conflict with the other tribe. Because you’re in some sense competing for resources. But you’re also unified on a higher plane. So that shared unity, and now what does that do to your conceptual self? Now you need to start thinking outside of war. Or at least outside of war that is extermination. You need to find a reciprocal nature of self. And value the potential in them. They are the stranger that might provide you with salvation when trouble hits. There’s a redeeming quality. So Fander Clay was talking about the afterlife and such. When my identity goes over multiple generations, then how do I live on? I live on in the capacity of my family to get the sand. If you’re relating to humanity as such, how do you live on in humanity as such? In an altruistic manner effectively. You live on in the capacity of humanity to manifest the ideal, which is goodness. Your eternality is given by the stamp that you put on that project. If we go back to the dilemma that you were talking about, why do we value money or potential? It’s a hedonistic question. It’s a question of what do we value? What do we value? The valuing is three years into the future. Past three years into the future, your predictions are going to be useless. You can’t do that. It’s bound in a primitive sense of your own ego. You’re not a child. You’re not a child who’s feeding the family. It’s just a child. Everything’s feeding the child. Extremely ironic given how it places itself. You can still have that pattern on the level of the family. What is the family doing? It needs to take care of the family. Everything else is alien and a threat. It’s figuring out how to resolve these conflicts or accept them. Parents are going to have to starve to feed the child. That happens. We’re going to have to not have date night this week because we need to take the kid to the doctor. There’s all of these tradeoffs and acceptances happening. We’re going to miss the once in a lifetime event because the kid’s sick. These things all happen. What’s changed in your salient landscape is what you’re holding up as important. The wisdom is in knowing when it’s parasitic. When am I parasitic upon a family? I think the problem with development is if you look at the knowledge engine model where we have two types of knowledge and you think that maybe it’s possible that cognition is limited and it’s not the same for every person. I think that’s sort of obvious. I think that’s what I think. I think it’s not a thing that you can do. I think that’s what evolution wouldn’t be true. But also I look around and some people are dumb and some people are less dumb and whatever. If you think that though and you put all your cognitive power into particular knowledge you’re automatically unconsciously even privileging propositions autism or not, or whether you want to go with causes, doesn’t matter, it’s going to come across as autism. Right, because you’re not participating properly with the world, you’re in a proper relationship with other people, and that causes a problem. That’s why I don’t like terms like neurodivergent, like how, you know, it doesn’t make any sense. Like what’s the standard by which you’re judging the divergence, yeah, you don’t have one, and you can’t have one, and that’s silly, because there’s too much irregularity already, right? Like neurology is already spread out too much, there’s no average, there’s no average. You already have a lot of data sets. I mean, you have a different problem, even if you can average it, which is to say, just because the majority of things are in one way does not mean that’s how they should be. Right. Right? Well, that’s one of the orders. I mean, one of the interesting things is Vervecky, and Peterson, and Peugeot were talking, and I think they outlined three orders. The narrative order, the normative order, and the nomological order. And it’s like, oh, okay, right? And you’re going for the normative order, where most people do this, and therefore, that’s a type of order, and therefore we can do that. Well, fair enough, and that’s what wokeism is, right? We can get everybody on board with our crazy cult, which is really just following a religious pattern that’s broken, right? And I have a video on the three great religions of today, which is somewhat tongue in cheek, right? If we can just get everybody on board, it’ll work. And it’s like, well, there is a normative order, but I think it’s subservient to the narrative order, and there is a nomological order, but I think it’s subservient to the narrative order. No, by the way, I think the narrative order is a servant of emanation, right? And so not mere archetypes and archetypal patterns, but there’s an actual emanation out there, right? Because we’re still contained by this thing called creation, and that’s why you need a sense of creation, and of being is good, and it can’t be the big bang, because the big bang is not a sense of creation. It’s a propositional statement of how things unfolded over time using some mathematical model that fails right after, or yeah, right before the event. Right. It just starts to fail. Necessarily. It’s supposed to, right? It’s designed that way. If it didn’t fail, that would be truly startling. That would be terrifying. That would be God. And yeah. Right. Well, and girdles incomplete, like so many other things start… To gain the explanation of that first microsecond, you lose everything. Yes. That’s what it comes down to. That’s the frog problem, right? You can know what frogs are like by observing frogs, but you can’t know any individual frog truly well until you dissect it. But then you can’t know how the frog would act in the world because it’s dead. Right. And that is… You break the system. I told this to Vanderclay once. I said, Paul, the problem isn’t that it’s turtles all the way down, it’s girdles all the way down. It’s girdles and completeness theorem all the way down. All the way down. Yeah. At least… Hmm. The problem is that you can have a complete system if it’s paradoxical. Right. Actually, not, I would say, this is what we do every single time we make any category. Yes. Any category. We are performing a magic trick of bridging across a totally unsolvable paradox and we do it so intuitively, instantaneously with no cognitive dissonance or problems whatsoever. We’re performing a magic trick every single time we think that there is a unity anywhere. Right? Yes. So it’s necessarily we’re operating in a system that is built upon a paradox, paradoxes. I’m not quite sure how to… Or the gap, right? Like what are we standing on to bring heaven and earth together? We’re standing in the middle of the Izzot Gap. We are the bridge across the Izzot Gap. There is no other bridge. It’s not science, it’s not math, it’s not good feelings and good thoughts, it’s not purple talking unicorns that make rainbows, as much as that’s my big dream, right? It’s not any of those. It’s one of the ironies of materialism as a concept is that it constantly seems to forget that the thing creating materialism is itself a part of the creation. Yes, exactly. It’s like, how’d you get out of that? Well, and that’s what it is. You live in a universe that makes consciousnesses to view itself. That’s a problem. That’s like a real deep problem. I mean, obviously we can’t get out of that. It’s a real deep problem. I mean, obviously we call it the hard problem of consciousness, but it’s amazing to me how quick we are to forget what it means to have that much ground underneath us, right? Yeah, I’m not quite sure how to say it. It’s frustrating. It’s very frustrating. That’s the denial of creation. Your subjectivity is built upon a bed of materialism that goes all the way down, right? It carries all the weight of all that materialism. If you’re gonna accept a materialistic view of reality, you have to imbue the subjective with all of that material. There’s no way around it, right? And now you’re just smashing your face back into the paradox, right? Yeah, well, that’s the denial of creation. I mean, I think even Peterson’s guilty of denial of creation. They’re just not gonna deal with it. They’re gonna skip over that part, right? And then they’re gonna say, oh, yeah, there’s definitely emanation, but let me tell you about emergence, right? And they go into detail on emergence and everybody misses that. I’m like, no, no, no. Well, because we’re an authority from that perspective. Well, yeah, but true. But also people are giving people the benefit of the doubt and they’re not understanding. I’ve got this image in my head. I’m trying to get one of my artists to do this, right? It’s like there’s a staircase. At the top of the staircase, there’s a Christian looking down, we’ll say, right? And at the bottom of the staircase, there’s like a John Vervecky or a Jordan Peterson, right? And then the view, because it’s the second image of this, the view from the Christian’s point of view is Jordan Peterson is two steps from the top. But the reality is he’s at the bottom. He’s got like 30 steps to go, guys. He’s not two steps from the top. And that’s the difference between the meaning crisis and the crisis of faith. Crisis of faith, we’re near the top of that thing and they’re ready to come up and you can just reach your hand down and grab them. But the meaning crisis people, the meaning crisis people forget about it, forget about it. They’re at the bottom because they haven’t started and maybe some of them have. Maybe Peterson is being as good, he’s got that down. But Vervecky doesn’t. He does not have that down, right? Because that requires a submission to creation, right? And then maybe it’s being, maybe the bottom stair is being and you have to climb that stair. You have to adopt that axiom. And one of the things that was great, Exodus, episode eight on Daily Wire, there’s a point in there where, oh, the eighth episode is so much better than the others. It’s like, oh, just skip to eight and forget. I mean, there’s good stuff throughout. I mean, it’s wonderful watching Dennis Prager in the moment go, you guys have really taught me something about, I always dismissed this theory before. I thought all my Jewish friends were stupid, but you know, Jonathan Bischow or Jordan Peterson, you really made me think about that right in the moment, which is what’s wonderful to watch when people admit that they found something. But the interesting thing is Oz Guinness at one point sort of goes after Peterson and says, no, no, Jordan, it’s God emanating down from above. And Peugeot stops him and says, hold on Oz, I wanna defend Jordan here for a second because he has a way of talking to the secularists, right? Where they don’t have any of these conceptions. And so he has it build it up step by step. That’s what gave me the image, right? Thinking about that, oh yeah, he’s building it up step by step. He’s starting at the very bottom and showing you that you’re not standing anywhere. That you’re not, and I think Peugeot used to ask everybody where they were standing. I think he sort of asked people where they’re starting. It’s like, you don’t know where your assumptions start. That’s the middle out thinking, which I have a video on. That’s the middle out thinking. You don’t know where you’re starting. And then once you figure out where you’re starting, you’ll know where you’re standing. And once you figure out where you’re standing, then you can figure out how far down that staircase you actually are with axiomatic assumptions. Because you probably just made a bunch of assumptions like, well, if I do this, then I’m good, right? Or if this is the thing, then it’s good. It’s like, oh no, this is what wisdom tells you is that there are no good things and there are no good actions. That’s what it tells you. It’s like, oh no, that’s terrifying. What do I do? What do I do? Well, you have to do hard work. And you have to make a sacrifice. And that’s where the value of life is. That’s the value, that’s the sacrifice. That’s why it matters whether or not you want to be complete or consistent. You can’t be consistent with your children. If you have an eight year old and a six year old, you can’t treat them the same. Are you high? Interestingly, you almost have to… So everything you pick up to address the crisis of meaning, you then have to throw away again to address the crisis of faith. Nah. Like if you have a meaning crisis, I don’t think you should argue for a crisis of faith. Because I don’t think you have a crisis of faith if you’re in a meaning crisis. So I had a conversation and at a certain point, I wanted to have the guy recognize emanation. Because I mentioned it a couple of times, right? Like he flat out ignored it and went his own path. And at a certain point I was like, why don’t you engage with this? And then he said, well, so on the top is God. And I’m like, no, no, no, we can start low, right? Like, I don’t know what example I used, but I’ll use the example of getting up. Like so getting up in the morning, right? Like there’s a limited set of good ways to get up in the morning to have a successful day, right? So those are gonna dictate how you get up. Like that’s emanation, right? Like that, and so that’s not a constraint of nature. Like that’s not an emergent constraint. Like that is a constraint of your participation in the world, right? And how intelligibility affords you interaction with your environment. And like engaging with that, like just that. Merchant could have you doing the exorcist walk out of bed every morning. Right. Exactly. But yeah, like, so what do you get, right? Like either you get glazing eyes, right? Because they don’t understand the implications or you get an acceptance and then like they don’t integrate the concept, right? Because like it’s too hard, too much to integrate the implications of that thing, right? Because that like effectively means that you’re subjected, right? Like you’re subjected to things that inform you, right? So we can bring it back to the narcissism, right? Like so the narcissism is in some sense, the natural step from that recognition, right? It’s like, oh, like there’s all of these things that have this imposition upon me and I want freedom, right? And I’m gonna have freedom through rebellion, not freedom through submission. Right. And so, yeah, like what, yeah. Wait, wait, how do we get here? Oh, why is, what were you trying to hit on when separating the meaning crisis from a crisis of faith? Why are the tools you pick up to address the meaning crisis not then thrown back away to address a crisis of faith? Well, the difference is that the crisis of faith happens when somebody is, we’ll say traumatized late enough in life out of their Christianity. So we’ll say 18 through 25 and up, right? Or somewhere in that space, right? What happens is they had faith. They had all the symbolism, they had all the poetic information, it’s there, right? Now the materialism sneaks in and it’s everywhere. It’s all over the churches. This is why the modernity frame is so dangerous. Because if you think it’s modernity, the church is definitely a solution because it moves more slowly. But if it’s not modernity and it’s materialism and the materialism is already in the church, church isn’t gonna solve it, right? You have to attack the right problem. So the materialism sneaks in and then it tells you, no, no, no, the best way to know the world because you can know it with a level of certainty through accuracy and precision, right? Notice all the science, right? You can do all this. The best way to know the world is actually through propositions and procedures. You can explain everything that way, economics, politics, everything, you can explain everything that way. And look at all the power that has. It has a lot of predictive powers, no question about it. And then you go, oh, well, wait a minute, this God thing, there’s no certainty there. I can’t know the mind of God, right? That’s a heresy, fair enough. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? Oh, all right, I’m outta here. I’m out, I’m not doing this church thing anymore, I’m done. Contrast that with people who have never had faith. They’ve never understood symbolism. So you look at somebody like Reveiki and he doesn’t get it. Reveiki does this talk with Jacob Kishir. And Jacob Kishir says, so there I am trapped in the middle of Athens, Greece during COVID. And I’m just like, well, can I be you? Like, what the hell? He said, he’s had psychedelic experiences, he’s done mushroom, but he’s done some of this stuff. So he’s got some of these experiences. And he’s still in a meaning crisis, right? He goes to the Orthodox church, the Greek Orthodox church in Athens. I was just like, can’t even imagine how awesome that must be, right? And he says, I see all this stuff. And like, yeah, it’s there, right? It’s shiny, it’s exemplified, it’s there. He says, but then I leave the church and suddenly I see this stuff in the world. So the patterns that are exemplified in the church appear in the world and all of a sudden the connection happens, right? There’s no drugs involved, you don’t need them. And then bang, now all of a sudden like something happens. But the problem is that Verbecky doesn’t like take that seriously enough, right? Like first, it means you don’t need the drugs. That’s kind of important. Second, the drugs don’t work because they didn’t, right? But the other thing that it means is that gaining that symbolic understanding of the world by having it highlighted in the church, that’s the poetic information. That’s the thing that connects the world in a way to make it rational to you, to make it make sense. Like that’s the magic. The poetic information is the thing that allows you to co-manifest and co-create meaning in the world, with the world, with yourself and with others. That’s what does it. You can’t do it using procedures. If I just come up to you and I go, hello, Nick, nice to meet you. My name is Mark. It just doesn’t have the same juice. Like it’s just, that’s the procedural way of doing it. And look, you have to bootstrap things with procedures. You have to fake it until you make it, right? You have to go through the motions until you kind of figure it out, right? That’s like, how do you learn to ride a bike, right? If I tell you balance, that’s absurd. If you can stand up, you can balance. Why are you telling somebody to balance? That’s dumb, right? And yet there’s a, you’re putting someone’s attention somewhere and the world, as Jonathan Pujol likes to say, is attention. And that works. So the propositions, right? And the procedure of just riding a bike over and over again. And eventually you just start riding a bike. It’s pure magic, right? It’s pure like Zeno’s paradox says, riding a bike is impossible, right? Learning to ride a bike is impossible because you try to use materialism, which is propositions and procedures to understand how humans ride bikes, you can’t. It doesn’t work. You can read papers about why it doesn’t work. We know it doesn’t work. You can think about it for 10 seconds. It can’t work. There’s no possible way to understand how people come to ride a bike. My proposition is in procedures. The classic. We don’t appreciate that. No, you could write a million pages on the color red and it will never offer the experience of the color red. Right, it’s the same problem. And yet there is a normative color red. It’s not precise and it’s not accurate, but it is more than adequate for us to cooperate. And that’s what, when you’re not focused on the relationship, can I make this relationship work? Let’s suppose you’re going out with somebody and you’re like, can I make this relationship work? That’s not, I’m looking for the perfect partner. Which trade-offs? Oh my goodness, you choose your food loudly. What am I gonna do? That really bothers me. It’s like, oh no, right? Oh no, if you want perfection, you’re screwed. But you know. This is one that I always try and say. What you’re looking for is none of that. What you’re looking for is a system, a relationship with that person by which you may mutually shape each other. Because no matter where you start, if the system is aligned, you will move closer. Even if you start from very far apart. Rule 10, beyond order. Take care of your relationships, basically. Right, and Peterson goes into this. It’s something that Manuel and I had talked about before her book came out, which was the thing you’re submitted to in a relationship is not your wife or your husband. It’s not the other person. Yeah, right, it’s the relationship. Yeah. It’s the relationship. And then yeah, to your point, you’re both moving towards the thing. Because look, you wanna get in a relationship, really? You’re a useless, idiotic slob of a human being. You’re a nothing. The purpose of the relationship is to make you different and better. And when you’re different and better, maybe you can put up with the love chewing. I don’t know. I have no idea. But you need to be able to understand that in order to embark upon that journey and make that work. And that is a submission to something outside yourself because you’re a useless, idiotic slob of a human being. You’re so incomplete and inadequate. It’s a wonder anybody will even speak to you, you muppet. And in a real sense, right? Because we have this essentialism that permeates our culture and understanding that makes it seem like everyone’s a jigsaw puzzle and either they fit together or they don’t. I think it’s a lot more like a… Greek hero, his boat. Do you know what I’m talking about? There’s a thought experiment, which is the… Oh, please see it’s a ship. Yes, yes. You want the relationship that is the ship. That’s ironic, relationship, yeah. Relating ship, wait. Where it holds the identity even as every part upon it is replaced. That’s the mutual shaping. It carries you through any change to the point where everything could be replaced and you still recognize it as the thing. Right, right. Exactly. And that’s the problem. We have no reasonable appreciation of any of this because we’re too busy believing that we’re rational and that the world is rational. And because we’re rational creatures, we can understand the world rationally. And that only takes you so far because rationality, logic and reason only work within a framework. And that framework, whatever framework you define is fundamentally religious. That is the definition of religion. And if you believe you do not have a religion, one will be provided to you without your knowledge or consent. And that sort of explains what’s going on nowadays because it’s still the culture all the way around. And that’s where the problem is. So I think this is a ship is actually related to what is the identity that you hold onto. So if you wanna hold onto a spiritual identity, which is what most things are. More relational identity. Yeah, like most things, it doesn’t matter whether you worship a statue and what the shape of the statue is because it’s pointing at, it’s affording a relationship. So when we’re talking about a ship, when we’re talking about naming a specific thing, the reason that we name it is that we can have a shared relationship to it. So in some sense in the idealism, that if we connect the relationship to the material, then that is real. But you also have like the founding of the city or something that Joe talks about where it’s like, who was it? Well, some guys have said better, and like them people started living there. So there was like a fate relationship, like, okay, we’re gonna do this and everybody’s believing it. And the materiality is called joining around this idea and manifesting that in reality. So there’s the potential for emergence and then there’s the gathering of the emergence into a shared conception, right? Because all of these people are in some sense, individual entities. Like it’s not that the army like got them out and well, maybe also that happened, but like in general, like they’re looking for a furthering of themselves and they find a furthering of themselves in the shared project. And yeah, I wanna connect this a little bit too for vague because I was thinking about Feveiki and his spiritual experiences, right? And he kind of said like, I’ve had all of the experiences, right? And I think he was referencing most of the meditative things, right? Like I got all of these states and I’m just thinking it’s like, okay, like I believe him. Right? Like I believe that he’s gone through all of them, but does that mean that he gained the insight? Because like we three agreed that he’s missing a bunch of things. So it was like, okay, so what’s the value of these experiences at this point? Right? Like there has to be a connection to the ammunition or something. If the framing of the experience doesn’t connect to participation in the world. And in some sense, and this is the thing I’m starting to believe more and more and more is like, no, like you need certain framing to have certain experiences. Like if you don’t have framing, like they’re inaccessible, right? By definition, an experience is relational. You can’t have an experience of just a thing, right? It’s always in the context of how the relation is occurring. So of course, you need certain contexts. I mean, it’s literally half of the experience itself. Now that’s troubling because it means we lack a tremendous amount of control. Yes. And again, we cycle back into faith and we cycle back into wisdom and we, right? You can hear the problem. But Tveki is arguing for a state of no-thingness, right? So he’s actually arguing for a contextless state and that that state should give you a bunch of affordances, right? No, that’s not true though. Because that definition, the no-thingness is an apophatic category. It achieves its relationality through the thingness. Right. Right? It’s context is in contrast to thingness. Yeah, it’s not a state that can possibly even be contemplated. Like this is one of the, right? It’s like the determinism argument. Oh, we must be, you know, it must be determinism all the way down. That’s like, you couldn’t come up with the concept of determinism if you didn’t have free will. Well, stop it. It’s that simple. Like that’s the counter argument to determinism, right? And people get confused because they think free will means free to do whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want, however I want. I was like, that’s not what free will means, right? And also determinism, they sort of water that down, right? And so, you know, it’s a game that you have to play to make it work because it obviously doesn’t actually work in the real world, no matter how many times Sam Harris insists that it does. Right? And it’s the same sort of game and the same sort of problem where instead of dealing with the hard work of accepting the conflict of existence, because your existence is a conflict. You’re using up, you’re dirtying the water, you’re using up air, right? You’re polluting the world. Right? Like what the hell, man? And it’s really handy to have original sin. Cause like, yes. And Brett Weinstein, I watched him once actually reinvent original sin with his framework. And I just sat there like, this is so hysterical. He doesn’t even realize he did it because it’s inevitable when you observe the world that that is the way the world is. And reality is it to some extent, not entirely, but to some extent is that which objects to your subject. Right. It’s the thing that sort of tells you you’re wrong. Yeah. And yeah, I don’t know if it’s fair to, I mean, you guys probably know better than I do. I don’t know if it’s fair to say that Vervecky argues for no thingness because it seems like while he certainly privileges it, he likewise recognizes that it must be synthesized with the, what’s the word? Not menial, but our normal experience. Mundane, mundane, yes. Yeah. He’s making the description between adjectival and what was the other one? Adverbial qualia. Adverbial. And I got like, I don’t know if I’m in agreement with that distinction, right? But he’s saying that you can reduce, fully reduce to the one. And I don’t think. Right. I don’t think. That’s nonsense. Yeah. Like the fact that you’re not perceiving the framing that you’re in or you’re in some sense surrender to it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. Or it just means that you don’t see it. And like, what are you doing, right? Like if you’re doing, well, I guess this is transcendental meditation, right? Like you’re shaping yourself into a structure, right? Like you’re performing a pattern and at a certain point that pattern will have a reliable expression within you. Right. Is that the nature of reality or is that just the nature of you doing the pattern? Well, and that’s the big problem with his work is what he’s describing are profound experiences. And he’s saying they’re transformative. And I’m like, no, they’re not. The transformation requires stuff outside yourself. And Vicki never talks about that. I mean, he gives it some lip. He’s like, oh, communitas. Okay, John, what does that look like? What qualifies as communitas and what doesn’t qualify as communitas? Because I need other people to transform. He does give lip service to Agape as well. I actually wonder how does he tie the no thingness with Agape? Right, I don’t- That would be an interesting question. Yeah, that’s not a bad question. I think it’s argued, right? That the no thingness is the state of objectivity, right? Or non-egoic things. And you need to have that state in order to be in a proper flow state or in a proper agape state. Like I think that would be the argument. Yeah. Yeah, but if you make that argument, what you’re saying is that the agape is primitive to no thingness. Yep. So there is a thing there prior to nothing. Right, well, the no thingness- If you make that argument. Yeah, the no thingness argument can’t work. Like it just can’t, it’s a full stop, never gonna happen type of an argument, like determinism, right? It’s not a conception that can actually be useful in the world for you to understand anything or know anything or inform yourself with. Like it just, it’s a bad signal, right? Or it’s actually the lack of signal in which case it’s not something that you can use for- I don’t know if that’s fair. I think it’s the signal- It’s negative theology again, right? It’s like, oh, like how do I get to no thingness by the removing of the thing? Like what? Well, I think the point of the, well, I don’t know if it’s the point. It seems like the conundrum of the experience is that when there are no signals, there’s still a signal. Right. Right, that’s why it’s such a bizarre experience. There is nothing and yet the no thingness is itself a thing. There is no possible state where there are no signals, right? Unless death is that state, in which case we’re not having that discussion and you didn’t have that experience to talk about it, which is a different problem. And that literally is where the problem comes in because you don’t live in a disconnected universe as an objective object out there. And therefore, if you try to get to no thingness to the state of zero signals, you are a signal. And there can’t, because you’re still there, there’s still a signal. And they don’t want to acknowledge that because in John’s world, the flow state, for example, is an unmitigated good. And I’m like, dude, I’m here to tell you, climbing a mountain being the flow state and falling off happens. So flow is not, like this is not, it’s not a pure good. It’s not an untrammeled pure good. That’s not what it is. I know he’s made the argument. Where does he get good truth and beauty from? From the one. Yeah, it all comes from the one. He’s made the argument stating they exist, but I don’t think he’s done anything more. Yeah. And then everybody’s, everybody’s has a problem, my opinion, because Peugeot’s like, oh, more beauty, more beauty, more beauty. And Sally Jo points this out, right? Like a military parade is beautiful. Right. That’s not good though, right? So the beauty doesn’t give you the good and it doesn’t give you the true. And the true doesn’t give you the beauty. That’s why we always say them as a Trinity. Might be that you need all three at once. It’s weird, right? It’s weird that these threes keep showing up and that even if you’re a Tesla, 369, those are the keys to the universe. Fair enough, probably. So says Tesla. Okay, well my brain is running out of steam. Personally, I have such, I don’t have these conversations very often anymore. So when I do, I find them vastly more exhausting than I used to. You’re out of training. Yeah, there’s definitely a point where I feel like I’m just like up somewhere in the head. And I don’t know. It’s like an ambient white noise. But, well, yeah. We should do this again. I think I’m probably gonna disappear here. Nick, thanks. It’s good to see you. We don’t see you enough. We don’t have enough of these conversations anymore. We used to. You got some love in the chat. I’ll put it on. I got what? You got some love. No, love. Oh. Although I should, damn, there’s a lot of scrolling here. No, it’s good to see you. It’s great to talk to you. Oh, we never got to Cubs. I just read the title in the corner. We kind of mentioned Cubs. No, we touched on it. We touched on it. Yeah, that’s true. We did. But no, I really appreciate you taking the time and having a chat and all that, because we miss you, man. We definitely miss you. Likewise, I’m always here. I’m open to invitations. I’m trying to focus on other areas of my life quite heavily at the moment. So I spend less ambient time in the space, but I always greatly enjoy it. And it’s always super fun talking to both of you. So anytime. I would say I’ll try and pop in more, but I say that every time and then I don’t. So I feel like I’m just lying to make it feel better, but. That’s okay. We’ll schedule another one of these and we’ll find more topics to talk about. Maybe we’ll continue some of the themes here because it’s so rich, right? We’re in a very target rich environment for discussion for better or for worse. Very true. And we’ll drag you by your hair until you lose it. Well, there’s plenty to grab onto for now. Okay, yeah. I don’t know if I will find this thing. I wanna answer some of these questions, but I don’t wanna hold you up, Nick. If you wanna jump off, we can answer questions without you. I can do a few questions. I can try at least. All right, so we’ve got Lynn, our good friend Lynn here. Is there a component to emptying one out, Jesus, empty cup, or dissolving your shadow? And I would classify that as two sort of separate questions, but you wanna have a shot at it, Nick? Yeah, I was actually thinking about this just at the end of our conversation here when it comes to the apophatic theology or moving towards the ground of being. I absolutely view it as like a, that’s the taking the pickaxe to your cave, right? Like you gotta open up somehow that tunnel shape again. And I do think it is an extremely important ability to be able to move between those two states. So, you cannot write the classic cheesy saying, you can’t fill a cup that’s already full. And you really do have to, at least in my experiences, drain yourself of your, in my case, it was forced upon me, or rather the choice was become a psychopath or humble myself. Like those were, it was one or the other. Like I’m either gonna be schizophrenic or I’m gonna submit. And so it was, and then I chose to submit, thankfully. And, but it very much, dissolving the self is important. It’s just not an end into itself, right? There’s a purpose to it and- Part of the cycle. And as long as you keep it part of a cycle and realize it’s not some end state that’s necessarily achievable. And is there also an ideal that you probably will never reach? Never reach. Never reach. Yeah, and you need a way to have never reaching it be a good thing. Not only an okay thing, but a good thing. Acceptance. Well, that’s the acceptance of the conflict. There’s a conflict in the ideal in that you’re probably never going to reach it. And you have to accept that and still strive for it as though it’s not acceptable to you, right? And that’s the hard part. Even delight in it, right? Yeah. I mean, you gotta be careful with that because you can go- Turn the struggle into joy. Otherwise it turns into suffering. So it’s your struggle. The struggle is there. You can make it joy or suffering. That’s kind of up to you. So I wanna connect it to flushing the toilet actually. So you have your shit there, right? And you wanna get rid of your shit, right? And like there’s this big release. Toilets and tunnels. And yeah, there’s this flow, right? And in some sense that flow is emptying outside of your house, right? So it’s moving to noting this in some sense, right? It’s moving to everything. That’s better said, I think, than noting this, right? Just be careful where you’re swimming at the beach later that day, because it might come back to you. Right. And so- So- So- So- So- So- So- So- So- So- So- So- To go on with the analogy, right? Like then you wanna be grateful that the shit is no longer there and that you don’t have to deal with the smell. But you also, like, so there’s this gratitude component which is recognizing in some sense the humility, right? Like the, like without the toilet, you’d be in deep shit, right? Yes. Literally. So- Damn it. So yeah, so then recognizing the need for the toilet and then looking from there back to the world and sit well, like, cause that’s the dealing with the shadow aspect, right? It’s like, okay, I’m at the bottom, right? Like now that I look up, do I still see the same thing? Like- Right. Right. Right. And I do, let’s address this next one. I have a question about the subject of identifying with humanity as an escape to the self other antagonism. Is it possible that humanity is just another larger self other that is an antagonist to AI or non-human animals? Which is the second part. And I think, look, this is binary thinking and it’s wrong. Like dualism is wrong. If you’re caught in a dualism, it’s just wrong. It’s that simple. Like dualism is wrong. Triangles are in the way. There’s three, there’s always three. There’s never two, there’s always three. I literally think binaries don’t exist. Like I have yet to find one in the world. You can cast things as binaries and that’s useful. And you should do that cause sometimes you have to make choices, right? But really when you’re making a decision, you’re not deciding between two things. You’re deciding in favor of one thing at the exclusion of all of the other things. You may cast it as deciding between two things, but you’ve placed one in two of the hierarchy already up against each other. And then you’re making the decision and it appears to be a binary, but it’s not. Like there’s no point in trying to identify anything as against you when you can cooperate with it. And this is one of the deep problems I have with, and even Pastor Paul Vanderglay does this, right? He says, well, I prefer opponent processing. And I’m like, no, opponent processing is bad. It’s cooperative processing. Why? Because if it’s opponent processing, there’s a plane and you’re fighting over that plane. And one of you has to win and one of you has to lose. But if it’s cooperative processing, you’re actually in a triangle. And now you can each sacrifice a little to both move up further. And that lifts you out of the two dimensional trap of binary thinking and into the three dimensional world of awe and wonder. And that’s the difference. And I wanna argue that you can keep the perspective of the bottom of the triangle, right? And from that position, it’s a sacrifice, right? But if you move your perspective from the bottom of the triangle to the top, right? Like it’s just natural. It’s what you have to do, right? The sacrifice doesn’t even fit into it because you don’t think lifting your arm is a sacrifice, but you’re burning calories. That is a sacrifice because now you need to eat more. So it’s dependent on the relationship that you take, whether it’s a sacrifice or not. And also, it’s not identifying with humanity. It’s identifying with personhood, right? Yes. And persons are in human bodies, right? Like when you put it that way, like you don’t wanna define what a person is, right? Or I can give you a definition, right? Like it’s not gonna be satisfactory because like, and you don’t need to, right? Like you can have fuzzy boundaries. Like why do you want concrete boundaries? I think to his point as well though, if I read the question correctly, it is entirely possible to use a larger identity as an escape from your own. That is 100% possible and should definitely be, that’s part of like, you know. Yeah. Yeah, that’s actually the problem. That’s a danger that you need to be aware of and trying to take into account. Right, but it doesn’t solve the problem, right? Because yeah, then you’re in an, if you have an antagonistic attitude and that’s the only way you can understand the world, then you’re always gonna be an antagonism to something and escaping where you are now doesn’t solve that problem because you’ve taken antagonism as a baseline because you’re trying to get to a place where only you exist and that place isn’t a place. Well, it’s the irony. I mean, we were talking about Gnosticism earlier. Most of Gnosticism is a projection of the self in the attempt to escape the self. And all you’ve done is taken that internal struggle and projected it as a universal, right? So now creation itself is bad. And now, right, you’re subjected by the demiurge who is almost certainly the mono, oh, shit, really homunculus inside your own head. Right. That’s the demiurge. And you’ve just like thrown them out into, you know. So yeah, you can’t, it’s not a legitimate form of escape. It doesn’t mean people that we all don’t constantly try to escape that way. It’s just, you know. And to be fair, there’s almost certainly a utility in projecting personal problems onto the world because then you have a chance to see them if they look foreign to you. Right. But you know, it’s a different process than wholeheartedly believing that projection. Right, exactly. And so like the ultimate thing in Neoplatonism is that you project it all up into the one, right? Where it’s like, it doesn’t have separation anymore, right? No identity. The problem is that it has to come down, right? So whether you put it on humanity or like, okay, like I identify with humanity, okay. Like, okay, are you gonna stand up or are you gonna keep sitting on your ass? Like, how do you answer that question when you identify with humanity? It’s like, that question doesn’t make any sense in the level of humanity. Well, or it’s a very convenient way because you know, Joe next door, he’s not on his ass. So I think I’ll take some of his, I’ll claim a little bit of his responsibility. Yeah, do we have something else that we wanna put up? Yeah, we can put this up. The way I see it, antagonism emerges from zero sum games. As an example, there was a zero sum game on the surface area of the earth. Maybe absent this limit, there would be no America or China. Well, yeah, there would be no countries, but there will also be no us because there would be no place for us. Like this is the problem with bad framing. And the way to spot bad framing is you’re stuck in a paradox. If you’re stuck on a paradox like Zeno’s paradox, which shows you the limits of materialistic thinking, right? Or this paradox where you’re just, you’re stuck in a paradox. That means your worldview is broken. That’s what it means. It means that you’re thinking of something backwards. The way to think about it is that zero sum games are created by closed world systems. All closed world systems are zero sum game. So the minute you find yourself in a zero sum game, you’ve created a closed system. We don’t live in a closed system. It’s not possible because you can create value. And this is where nihilism comes from. You build a closed world system in your head and then value can’t be created. It can only be moved around. Well, now there’s an antagonistic relationship and the top down power from above narrative is correct. And the only way you can get something is by taking it from somebody else. None of that is true. And it takes 10 seconds to prove it. Which is why I don’t understand why anybody’s stuck with it. It’s like so easy. The iPhone just proves it. That’s because propositions don’t do very much for people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right, right. But you can see that hopefully the contradiction in the system, you’ve already assumed the closed world system and now you’re screwed. Because in a closed world system, wealth redistribution is the correct answer. That’s actually true. If you can’t create any wealth, if you can’t create an iPhone, if you can’t create any more value than what already exists, then we should all equally have wealth spread out amongst us. That would be true in a closed system. Also to be a little bit more fair towards the nihilism, there are certainly situations where you cannot denying or finding the escape route to the closed system requires your death. Right? Yes. So it makes sense to frame things in a closed world system when you are living in, right? The only way out of it is just to not exist anymore. Right? Say in the case of starvation or extreme circumstances that people regularly encounter will impress that closed world on them so heavily that, you know, yeah, it’s a totally fair response. You build one to survive because you shrink your attention down to things you absolutely need to. Right. That’s when the reciprocal opening has to come in. Right? And that’s what’s required. And if you don’t do that, you’re in trouble because you’re just building a system that’s closed for yourself. And yeah, it’s a threat to open up a closed world system because in the closed world system, you know how things work. And so it’s very comfortable to stay, like I’ve got good predictive power, right? And then when a predictive power doesn’t work, you get angry and resentful and then you start blaming other people and that’s not gonna do you any good because there’s way more other people than there are of you in case the math failed you there. Right? Like I can assure you that’s true. And so all you’re gonna do is be angry and resentful and that’s only gonna hurt yourself. It’s really not gonna help you to cooperate with others and build something bigger than you. And that’s where the nihilism comes from is once you see the closed world and you can’t bring yourself to submit to the fact that you could open it up, zoop, the world shrinks and you’re screwed. Or if there literally is no opening, you know, again, there’s certainly circumstances where there is no opening. The only opening is that you die and hope that there’s an opening on the other side of the death. That would require faith. That would require faith. Yeah. Well, yeah, but this goes back again, right? Like, because what do you value, right? This is like the existential. Yeah, but if you have a solipsistic framing, right? Like then, like you don’t need an afterlife for there to be an opening up, right? Like you can just say, like there’s other people living and that’s enough. That’s true. That’s true. Like I have a nuclear button in front of me, right? Like I can push the button and extend my life for three seconds. Right. Like do I push the button to have three seconds? Like. Right, right. Well, and it’s also, you know, Buddhism’s useful. The lives of ascetic and non-ascetic Christian saints are useful, you know, like people are able to face, you know, starvation. These things that are deeply oppressive on our psyche and find that opening. They don’t find themselves lost in the world of nihilism just because of how heavily it oppresses itself. Granted, you know, it took a lot of practice and training and dedication to get to a place where that was the case. Yeah. So I guess as a conclusion, why I, yeah, sacrifice yourself, right? Like having the depth of an identity with the promise of a life in faith afterwards, right? I think it’s exactly that transformation that makes it not a sacrifice and instead a submittance. Right, yeah, but you can’t see that at the photo. Beforehand, yeah, very true, very true. Yeah, even if you do see it, you’ll still experience it as a sacrifice. No, I think, like, I think you can find joy in the surrender. So I don’t think you have to have an antagonistic relationship. I agree, but everything leading up to the surrender you’ll experience as a sacrifice until the joy. Right, you have to get to the altar and it’s after you got to the altar that you, you know, everything opens back up again. Well, yeah, well, maybe not if you can live in hope, right? The struggle, yeah, the struggle you have to, like life is struggle, right? Suffering is inevitable, right? But in that struggle, you can turn that into more suffering, not recommended, I’m not endorsing that one, or you can turn it into joy, right? And that’s why you need the agape, the tunnel of agape, right? To be able to do that, to channel that love that’s emanating from above through you and out of you into the world. Right. But it’s, you know, it’s one of those things too, like it’s so obvious when we see it or hear it, you know, the person, well, obviously, Christ is the image, right? Because all the Christians that did it were mimicking Christ as they did it, but facing, you know, ultimate betrayal, ultimate, you know, facing death and living through it in agopic love is one of the most powerful things a human could ever do. Amen. Amen. Yeah. Let’s wrap this up and, thanks Nick. It’s great to chat with you again. Maybe we should make this like a monthly thing or something. I’d be down. That sounds wonderful actually. Good. Let’s see what the audience thinks. They’ll put comments in and all that and tell us if they want more Nick. And if they don’t. We need more engagement so that we can like keep up the content, like we need things to identify against because we’re not sufficiently good by ourselves. Oh man. All right. Well, this was again, absolutely wonderful. Thanks for inviting me. Good to talk to you both. And yeah, let’s do it again. Have a great day, man. Yeah, you too. All right.