#209 — A Good Life
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Summary
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman is a humanistic psychologist who has taught at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and elsewhere. He writes the column, Beautiful Minds for Scientific American, and he hosts the psychology podcast, The Psychology Podcast. He s also written for The Atlantic and Harvard Business Review, and his previous books include Ungifted, Wired to Create, Twice Exceptional, and The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence. In this episode, we talk about the difference between intelligence and creativity, the history of humanistic psychology, and the connection between well-being and ethics. He also has a podcast of his own, the Psychology Podcast, which he co-hosts with me, Sam Harris. He is the author of the book, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, which explores the relationship between wisdom and transcendence, the pre- and post-transcendence, and other topics related to the human mind and the human experience. He s a regular contributor to the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, and Salon, and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, as well as the Atlantic and The Atlantic. We discuss a wide range of topics, including: psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and philosophy, among other things. This episode was originally published in 2014, but is now available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and is available for purchase in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, and paperback. Kindle, and Audio Book, and Hardcover in hardcover, and will be published in paperback in paperback on November 2019. Thanks for listening to The Making Sense Podcast! - Sam Harris . Thank you for listening and sharing this episode with your thoughts on the podcast! and Good Morning America Subscribe to the Making Sense podcast? by Good Mythology Podcast? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts by clicking here. Subscribe by clicking the link below, and we'll send you a rating and review of the podcast by Good Morning, Good Luck! Good Luck Out There! Subscribe in iTunes and Good Luck out there! by clicking Good Luck, Sarah Good Luck and Happy Holidays! - Timestamps: 5 Starred, Timestimated: 5 Stars, 5 Star Reviewed? 5 Star Recommendation? 6 Starred? 7 Starred: 8 Starred 9 Starred by
Transcript
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So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at samharris.org to request a free
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And this is the first volume related to the podcast.
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It is called Making Sense, Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity.
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And in it, we've taken some of the best conversations from the first 200 episodes of the podcast
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So this was an interesting opportunity to make sure we had said exactly what we wanted to say on the topic at hand.
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So for those of you who'd want to revisit some of these conversations and see them in their final form, the book is available.
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And for the people in your life who haven't figured out how to listen to podcasts,
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this would be a great way to share some of the more interesting conversations I've had here with them.
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These are the conversations I've had with Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, David Deutsch, Daniel Kahneman, David Krakauer, Glenn Lowry, Thomas Messinger, Robert Sapolsky, Anil Seth, Timothy Snyder, and Max Tegmark.
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As you know, I recently did a podcast on racism and police violence.
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And then I went on to the cheerful topic of existential risk.
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My next podcast is going to be on the ongoing threat of nuclear war.
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Because today I'm speaking with Scott Barry Kaufman about human well-being.
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Scott is the author of the book, Transcend, The New Science of Self-Actualization.
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Scott is a humanistic psychologist who has taught at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and elsewhere.
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He writes the column, Beautiful Minds for Scientific American.
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He's also written for The Atlantic and Harvard Business Review.
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And his previous books include Ungifted, Wired to Create, Twice Exceptional, which he edited.
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And he also edited The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence.
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Anyway, we cover a lot of ground in this episode.
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We talk about the difference between intelligence and creativity.
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So, you've written a fascinating book titled Transcend, The New Science of Self-Actualization.
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And you also have a podcast of your own, The Psychology Podcast.
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Maybe let's start with just an introduction to your background in psychology.
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What sorts of issues have you focused on and how do you describe your work at this point?
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When I first started off, I got my PhD in cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and
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was really interested in the cognition of intelligence.
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And I actually started off in real traditional intelligence research, so studying IQ testing.
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And I was absolutely fascinated with what are the cognitive processes underlining intelligence
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And then it branched off a little bit to other forms of cognition like implicit learning and
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I was curious if unconscious learning was related to conscious learning and whether it was such
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a thing as unconscious intelligence that would correlate or not correlate with IQ.
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And then it moved on to creativity work and understanding the distinction and similarities between intelligence
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And then in the past four or five years, I've really gotten into positive psychology and
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humanistic psychology and trying to understand above just our mind and human intelligence, but
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how can we realize our whole being, not just one slice of us?
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You know, I want to focus mostly on the humanistic and positive side of things and talk about
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self-transcendence and the furthest reaches of human well-being.
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But maybe we can take a moment to tie it to some of your earlier work.
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How would you differentiate intelligence, creativity, and wisdom?
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Yeah, it's a great, great, great, great question.
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So intelligence, I view as the, we can just really shorthand it and say it's the ability
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And when I got into imagination research, I defined imagination as the ability to apprehend
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And so I actually view creativity as a combination of intelligence and imagination.
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So creativity is having the ability to apprehend what is and really learn and understand the
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real true nature of the world without any prior beliefs or biases.
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You also have to have that foresight into what society could be, what could humans become,
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And I see creativity as a combination of both intelligence and imagination.
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Creativity is somewhat paradoxical, it seems to me, because if you're too creative, right,
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if you're not obeying any of the rules, well, then it suddenly becomes worthless or next
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Like you're extracting meaning that either isn't there or is there only for you, right?
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And so there's, this is sort of where the psychedelic experience can become obviously not normative
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and not all that useful, even though, and I hope we'll talk about psychedelics as well.
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How do you view the sort of the rule following and rule breaking with respect to creativity?
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Yeah, one of the key aspects of creative people, and I did a research project and I was working
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on this book with the journalist, Carolyn Grigwar.
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And when I was working on that, I was trying to look to see what do creative people do differently?
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And one of the most obvious things they do differently is that they do things differently.
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You know, they, creative people are rule breakers in the sense that maybe they're not necessarily
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provocateurs and that's a different kind of rule breaking.
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And I think it's actually important to distinguish between those who are intentional, like I would
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say compulsive rule breakers versus those who do it as a means to an end for greater meaning
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Okay, wisdom has been defined in lots of different ways.
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In the psychological literature, it's been defined lots of, not just the psychological
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literature, but throughout the course of human history.
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But in my book, Transcend, kind of, that's the climax.
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And in understanding what wisdom could mean from a self-actualization perspective or a transcendence
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And I view wisdom as really encompassing this dichotomy transcendence that one of my favorite
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psychologists, Abraham Maslow, talked a lot about.
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He said, at the highest state of consciousness, lots of dichotomies that everyone else in our
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society is really interested and obsessed with and these false dichotomies, we're able to transcend
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them in some way and we're able to see how everything is just part of a larger whole.
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This might even have to be a, to make it concrete, it could be like the distinction between selfishness
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and altruism, you know, at the highest level of consciousness, if you're, and being the
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highest level of motivation, if you're selfish in the sense that you're getting really enjoyment
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out of what you're doing, but you are also connected to the world and your enjoyment brings
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enjoyment to others simultaneously, you know, the word selfishness starts to lose meaning.
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You start to have a more realistic understanding of human nature and you, on the one hand, can
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recognize the human frailties, but you also have the capacity to see that there's good
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Wisdom to me is really this ability to hold seemingly incompatible things in your head,
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as well as with yourself, recognize your own contradictions and see and zoom out on yourself
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and see all those contradictions as part of a integrated whole that could be integrated.
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My gosh, if you can find a way to take all these warring factions that exist within ourselves,
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we were evolved to be that way, you know, there was no unitary system that, through the
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course of human evolution, that tried to make sure that we were integrated humans.
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But my gosh, these humans who exist, who can work towards integration and feeling inner
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wholeness to some degree, those are very wise people, in my opinion.
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Yeah, well, so let's talk about your book and how you sort of scale that mountain where wisdom
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is the place one hopes to arrive. Why has positive psychology and humanistic psychology and
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the various branches that, I'm not sure how stable these labels are now, but why has the positive
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side of the human experience traditionally been given such little attention in psychology? I mean,
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I know that's changed of late with Seligman, perhaps, you know, first in my lifetime. But,
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and, you know, as you show in your book, we had people like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers and other
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people who go, who went by the label humanistic psychology, struggling to focus on this. And
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is it a legacy of sort of what Freud did to our thinking about the prospects of human happiness?
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How do you view the last, you know, century or so of psychology's emphasis on all that is wrong
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with the human mind or potentially wrong and basic ignorance of the possibility of things going right
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Well, you know, I will long believe that we should have listened to William James and not Freud. You
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know, we should have listened to, in some senses, the originator of research psychology or empirical
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data psychology. A lot of Freud's ideas were very armchair and were, ironically, projections of his own
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soul, so to speak, or his own issues, projecting that onto all of humanity. But you ask a very good
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question because humanistic psychology was quite popular in a 10 to 20-year period in the 50s, 60s.
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It caught the time of hippies, the sort of spirit of the 60s, and, you know, LSD and the beat writers.
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All this sort of idea of creativity and spirituality. It was part of the culture. And, you know, I am
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trying to, I try to think why it died out. And because it did die out from like the 70s till
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Martin Seligman really brought it back in a big way by putting positive psychology on a scientific
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foundation in 1998 or so. And what happened between the 70s and 1998? Well, you know, there's lots of
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ways of trying to answer that question. One way is recognizing that the bad is stronger than the good.
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We are more focused on when we have deprivations. And there's certainly no shortage of deprivations
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among humans to work on. Depression, anxiety. These things become more pressing concerns for
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us when we're in that deprived state. If we're feeling satisfied, we don't seek a therapist so
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that we are, you know, even more satisfied. I mean, if you go to a therapist and you say,
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Doc, I only feel average life satisfaction, but I want to be like these positive psychologists.
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I want to be, you find something else. You find a coach maybe, or you find a, you don't go to a
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therapist for that, you know, not clinical psychology, not psychology. You know what I'm
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saying? So the bad is stronger than good in a lot of ways. And it isn't important, you know,
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a purpose of the field of psychology, the stated mission of the APA and what I think psychology
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should be about is improving human life. And improving human life, like I said, there's no
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shortage of suffering. So that can take up a lot of it. So yeah, I don't know the exact answer to that
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question, but I think part of it is connected to the, uh, the spirit of the times in the fifties
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and sixties. And we don't really have that sixties spirit right now, do we? Yeah. Well,
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the sixties died in various ways. And for some reasons that makes sense. I mean, there was, there
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was a, an explosion of dysfunction in addition to all the enthusiasm and insight. There was a fair
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amount of dysfunction and chaos being advertised. And it's just, you know, I'm a big proponent of
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the wise use of psychedelics, as you probably know, but the haphazard use of them obviously
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comes with its significant risk. And, you know, that risk was borne out in, in many people's lives.
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I had another thought and that's that, you know, they're, they're definitely outside of psychology
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was there's, there was no lack of the Tony Robbins of the world or, or, or books on how to be your
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best self, how to realize your potential. So outside of psychology, you know, in the pop help. And I
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wonder if to a certain extent, the field of psychology, which likes to see itself itself
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as a like physics, you know, like a science, at least a lot of psychologists do, were really put
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off by, you know, trying to buy that world and wanted to distinguish itself from, you know, we're
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not self-help, you know, woo woo, you know, we're, we're more scientific. And I just wonder if that has
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part to do with it as well. Yeah, I think it does. And also the explicit religious and Eastern
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influence on humanistic psychology, I know we'll get into this, but people like Maslow were
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influenced by teachers like Krishnamurti or Buddhist writers like Alan Watts and the sort
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of brain trust for this movement, you know, positive psychology before it called itself positive
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would often meet at places like Esalen Institute. And, you know, that became a hub for the new
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age. And it gathered, you know, all of these influences, you know, some of which are, are
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really the antithesis of science. I once taught a, a weekend at Esalen a long time ago, but
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simultaneous with that, you know, I'm sure there were things in the catalog, like, you know, how
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crystals can balance your chakras and the sky's the limit in terms of what people will believe
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in the esoteric vein, you know, whether Eastern or Western in its influence. And it's, you know,
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it has a, it has much more in common with traditional religion than it does with scientific
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rigor. And so the stink of the new age on all of this is probably what academic psychology is,
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I think that's right. And then that stigma is still there. Sometimes when you say these,
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you do research in positive psychology, there's some sectors of psychologists that
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look down on that as maybe not as scientific or rigorous.
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Right, right. Okay. So now people have heard of Maslow, if they haven't really heard of him
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as a person or even humanistic psychology, most people have heard of his hierarchy of needs.
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And this is one of these exports from somebody's work that got somewhat falsified in the,
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in the transit to the rest of culture. So what is it that people think they know about this pyramid?
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And what is it that Maslow thought he was teaching about it?
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Well, a lot of people may have seen the pyramid. They may not even heard the name Abraham Maslow,
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but certainly they've, they've seen it on the internet, maybe diagrammed as a pyramid with like,
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now you see toilet paper at the bottom of the pyramid or in the age of COVID or, or
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Wi-Fi battery was popper before that. It's a meme. And it's suggesting there's different levels of
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needs. Some are more foundational than others. And Maslow's original theory, he never drew a
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pyramid or in his writings. And I mean, I was looking through the writings. I was like, where's the
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pyramid? Where's it? I didn't, I couldn't find a pyramid. And he was talking about a hierarchy of
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prepotency. We have some needs that are more prepotent over others that when they're deprived,
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they take up more of our attention. And we really focus all of our energy and resources to,
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to satisfying that. So he argued at the, at the base, although it's not a pyramid, but
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our most prepotent need, I should say, is the need, physiological needs like food, shelter, water.
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And then the next prepotent need is the need for love and belonging, according to Maslow. And then
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the next, the next prepotent need is need for esteem, esteem from others as well as self-esteem.
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And then the argument was, if we could have these needs, these basic needs met, then we can really be
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free to self-actualize, to become all that we're uniquely capable of becoming. You know, all of those
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basic needs are things that we share with other animals. And we also share with other humans. So
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it doesn't make you particularly special if you say, I'm lonely, you know, or I'm hungry,
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or I want respect. Yeah. Stand in line. Everyone wants respect, you know? So, but if you start to say
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something like, I can play a violin concerto, like no one else in the world can play a violin concerto.
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Now we're starting to talk about self-actualization. You know, what is this
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unique core potentiality within you that can make the greatest positive impact on the world?
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And that's what I think he meant by self-actualization. That's the original theory,
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but there was no pyramid. He actually made it very clear that, that life wasn't like this
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kind of video game. He never used that metaphor, but I use that metaphor in the sense that you don't
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reach one level of need, like the need for belonging. And then some voice from above is like,
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congrats, you've unlocked the need for esteem. And then you can go up a level like some,
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and then you never have to worry about connection ever again. He made it very clear that life is a,
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always a two step forward, one step back dynamic where we're always choosing growth. We're always
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trying to choose growth, but, but the fear response is always prepotent. You know, fear is always going
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to loom over us and uncertainty, but we have to consciously keep choosing the growth option.
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He made that very clear. And then it's germane to this idea that,
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we're both interested in with transcendence. He argued that the last couple of years of his
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life, that self-actualization wasn't the highest motivation in his hierarchy of needs,
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that there was a higher motivation. In fact, he realized that there were different types of
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self-actualizing people. This is an insight he wrote in a journal, personal journal entry of his
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that I found. He's like big insight today. I realized that there are actually different types
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of self-actualizing people. There are self-actualizers who are perfectly, perfectly content
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going their entire lives, realizing their own potential. And you know, maybe they read all
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the books, how to realize your full potential. They're obsessed with realizing their potential
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and maximizing their potential, but they really don't care much about maximizing the potential of
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society or maximizing the potential of others. There's not a great connection between self and
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others. They may dazzle with their talents or at work, they may be doing good work and they feel
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self-actualized. But they're not what Maslow called the transcenders. He argued that transcenders
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were a different kind of self-actualizers who were consistently motivated by higher values. He called
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them the B values, the values of being itself, things where there's no means to an end. There ends in
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themselves like the search for beauty, the search for justice, for meaningfulness in the world,
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for goodness. And you're motivated by these values, but also you're motivated by
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peak experiences in life. So these sort of spiritual, I guess you call them transcendent
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experiences in your life. And these transcenders, this is what they lived for, is these kinds of
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experiences and the realization of these kinds of values. Yeah, that opens up a lot of interesting
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questions because, you know, many of us who are in the transcendence business have noticed that
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there's the connection between so-called peak experiences or even, you know, more durable experiences of
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self-transcendence, which do seem normative within their purview. I mean, they have beneficial effects
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psychologically. They, you know, they mitigate psychological suffering. But the connection to
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ethics and, you know, commitment to, an intelligent commitment to helping other people,
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say, and the kind of normative pro-social emotions in action, that is, I think it's there. It's
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certainly advertised to be there in an Eastern context, especially in a Buddhist one, especially.
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But it's not as direct or as reliable as I think we would hope. And, you know, to testify to that fact,
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all you need to do is look at the careers of great meditators and, you know, teachers of meditation who
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have gathered students. Many of them have come from Eastern countries and come to the West to teach,
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and this was obviously happening in Maslow's time. And so many of them have produced incredible
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suffering among their students and mixed messages, to put it charitably, with respect to their teaching,
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because they, you know, they become, in many cases, we're probably talking about fraud. You know,
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these people are not who they say they are. But in the most interesting cases, I don't think that
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is what's happening. I think we're talking about people who have genuine insights, genuine access to
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fairly rarefied states of mind. These are not people who are failed meditators or failed yogis.
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These are, again, to one degree or another, spiritual athletes, but who still have whatever
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level of narcissism and ego needs and just unfulfilled desires that lead them to misbehave, sometimes
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with the abandon of a, you know, a rock star trashing a hotel room. And it's left many people
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thinking that there's no there there, which is a real integration of self-transcending wisdom and
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ethics that survive the normal tests, free of paradox that strains one's sanity and actually just leads
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people to be good and reliably harmless in proximity to others. And so, you know, I've come
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away from my collisions with this literature and to some degree these people feeling that there's more
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needed in the toolkit for living a truly examined life and becoming a better person than just having
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certain self-transcending experiences. I mean, certainly, I think the peak experience is
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the wrong model. I mean, whatever the peak is, it comes, it goes. It's not the ultimate insight into the
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nature of consciousness that will transform you because it, by definition, it came and it went.
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But what's needed is an actual conscious integration with ethics that makes sense. And this is where
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culture comes in and just the relationship between the individual and society, right? So it's just,
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yes, it's possible to have real breakthroughs privately in the in solitude. But when one comes
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out and interacts with the rest of the world, what one has to do that with are, by definition,
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one's beliefs, assumptions, you know, one's culture on some level. And, you know, in the Eastern case,
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you've had many of these people come from, effectively, theocracies with all of those norms
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and have used those norms as a template through which to interact with people. And that hasn't
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worked out so well. So anyway, I realize I've dumped a lot on you, but I guess I'm interested to
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know what you think about the larger footprint of wisdom and how it relates to things like
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self-transcendence and peak experience and the general project of becoming a better person.
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Yeah, there's a lot there. And I've spent a lot of time, when I was writing this book,
00:26:34.040
thinking about pseudo-transcendence. What does pseudo-transcendence look like? Maslow actually
00:26:38.760
talked about pseudo-growth. He talked about people who tried to jump to the top of
00:26:42.680
his hierarchy of needs without addressing their other needs, thinking that it'll somehow,
00:26:48.840
if they just meditate or if they just do LSD or they do spiritual practices, then suddenly they
00:26:54.200
won't have these abiding concerns anymore that they had. He called that pseudo-growth. So in my book,
00:27:00.280
I try to distinguish between pseudo-transcendence and healthy transcendence. So everything,
00:27:06.520
so this is a framework that Maslow used, but I started to see the whole world in that way.
00:27:11.720
Everything, so nothing in and of itself is good or bad. Everything has a D-flavor to it and a B-flavor
00:27:18.360
to it. So the D-flavor is a deficiency-motivated flavor to it. So you do it because you're trying to
00:27:25.240
satisfy some hole in yourself in some way. And anything can apply to that. You can have
00:27:31.560
D-humor versus being or growth-motivated humor. Love, you can have, or belonging, you can have D-belonging,
00:27:40.760
where you have a desperate need to belong with others because you severely lack belonging and
00:27:46.280
you're trying to change and control the world in some way. Or B-belonging, where you see people for
00:27:53.480
who they are, or B-love, love for the being of others, not what use they can, they exist to
00:28:00.040
satisfy some hole in yourself. So I think the big key is recognizing that integration is what matters
00:28:09.240
here. And I have a section in my book called The Hitler Problem. So when I get to the need for purpose,
00:28:15.240
I ask, well, was Hitler self-actualized? Because he clearly had a sense of purpose. He had a purpose.
00:28:22.120
I'm arguing purpose is a higher level of need. The point here is that life is not like a mountain
00:28:28.680
or a pyramid like it's been depicted in Maslow's. I actually have a new metaphor, a sailboat. And in
00:28:36.200
a sailboat model, and the reason why I think it works, and I'd love to get your thoughts on that,
00:28:39.800
is that it clearly shows that you need to have a safe and secure boat. Your basic needs need to be
00:28:48.120
met. There's no holes in the boat, no severely deprived aspects of your needs, or else you won't
00:28:53.480
go anywhere. You can't move in your desired direction when all you're focused on is securing
00:28:58.200
the boat. And for the boat, I talk about the needs for safety, the needs for connection, and the need for
00:29:06.280
self-esteem. But once our boat is secure, we can open the sail. And we open the sail and face the
00:29:13.160
vulnerability and the unknown of the sea. We move with purpose and direction with that sail, but we
00:29:20.200
move with integration of the spirit of exploration, not fear, and love, universal love, or what Maslow
00:29:27.400
called be love, love for the being of others. It's moving in that purposeful direction, but with an
00:29:32.680
integration of these other things. So the whole point here is that we operate as a whole vehicle,
00:29:37.800
experiencing the unknown of the sea. Even though we each move in our own direction, with our own
00:29:43.560
purpose, there can be a great unknown, a great wave can come crashing down on all the boats at once. And
00:29:49.320
then suddenly, we were all moving in our own direction, and now we realize, wait a minute, we're all
00:29:54.120
actually in the same sea together. So I think this metaphor works in a number of ways better than the
00:30:00.520
static pyramid. And also the pyramid doesn't show that the point here of wisdom is the integration
00:30:06.360
aspect. So people who appear as though they're trans, or will tell you, because they're gurus,
00:30:12.120
or that, you know, that I'm a transcendent being, you know, and they then they go abuse people in
00:30:17.560
their, or do whatever they, whatever, you know, you see all these atrocities from people who say they're
00:30:23.240
enlightened. Not all, of course, but you know, the kinds you point out. I would argue that
00:30:28.920
they're pseudo-transcending. They have built their spiritual practices on a very faulty foundation.
00:30:36.760
They still have unresolved, deeply unresolved belonging needs, or deeply unresolved safety
00:30:43.480
needs, or esteem needs. You know, they desperately need esteem. And so it's built on a very faulty
00:30:49.160
foundation. So that's why I think that this healthy transcendence model I talk about in the book,
00:30:54.600
I specifically define as, healthy transcendence is defined as the harmonious integration of the
00:31:00.520
whole self in the service of realizing the good society. That's how I define healthy transcendence,
00:31:06.120
to make clear that it's the connection between self and world, not being above the world in some
00:31:12.040
way. My conceptualization of transcendence might differ from other people's notions of transcendence,
00:31:16.520
but I wanted to make it very clear that it wasn't a horizontal thing. It's not like we're
00:31:21.080
transcending other people in some sense. It's actually quite the opposite. Healthy transcendence
00:31:26.520
is when we have this great unity with the world. Yeah. Well, I think the sailboat analogy is really
00:31:32.920
a good one. And I could see it break down at one point at the extreme end of transcendence, really,
00:31:40.360
where the things that seem to be needs for most of us, certainly most of the time, which is the
00:31:46.680
things that are part of the whole, you know, the deficiency needs, the safety, the connection,
00:31:50.840
the self-esteem, it really is possible, or certainly seems to be possible to transcend those in some
00:31:58.360
basic sense. Now, that's not really a norm you can recommend to other people, but it does seem like
00:32:05.320
a way of resolving some of the paradoxes you mentioned, you know, that Maslow was focused on,
00:32:10.520
or seeming paradoxes, or the dialectic between extremes, where if in fact it's possible to
00:32:18.520
achieve the sort of mind that sees fame and shame as being equally empty, right, well then
00:32:26.840
one has to question just what this need for self-esteem is really about in the end. You know,
00:32:32.280
if seeing yourself reviled on Twitter can be as meaningless as seeing yourself praised on Twitter,
00:32:37.800
you know, then you've surmounted something there, and it's not, you're no longer vulnerable to
00:32:43.640
the vicissitudes by which most people would define their effort to secure self-esteem or
00:32:51.720
being in good standing with a community, say. And I mean, there are even, you know, there are practices
00:32:57.400
in the contemplative tradition that explicitly target these opposites for this purpose, right? Like,
00:33:03.880
if you're a great meditator who thinks he's transcended his concerns about self-esteem,
00:33:10.280
well then your teacher may recommend that you do something that you would normally find just
00:33:16.680
absolutely mortifying just to see how you can inhabit that channel of human experience, right? So you
00:33:23.960
deliberately embarrass yourself or engage some way of life that reduces your status so that people begin
00:33:31.240
treating you differently and you begin to feel what that's like and play with that
00:33:37.000
mode of human experience. I mean, many people have done even just school projects where you go out in
00:33:42.360
a wheelchair, even though you're not, you don't need one, right? You just see what it's like to be in a
00:33:46.040
wheelchair and have everyone think, you know, you are a paraplegic and treat you with all the weirdness
00:33:51.560
that often evokes from people. There are many insights you can get from doing something like that, but
00:33:57.080
the thing you begin to notice is just how vulnerable you normally are to the changes in
00:34:04.440
affect and attitude and and assumption that can happen just based on some very simple social cues.
00:34:12.200
So apart from that, I guess we should talk about just how far this project of transcendence
00:34:18.440
can likely go because there is almost certainly false advertising here.
00:34:23.800
born of thousands of years of quasi-religious philosophizing, unconstrained by science, but
00:34:31.400
you know, in my experience, the assumptions that most Westerners and most, you know, most people,
00:34:38.840
it's not just Westerners at this point, make about the superficiality of the project of,
00:34:44.600
you know, let's say learning to meditate, you know, those assumptions can be proven false in a variety of
00:34:50.040
ways. And it's just, it's interesting that that's kind of a limiting factor on how people think about
00:34:58.520
Well, you said a lot of wise things there. I mean, I think it's really important to not treat these
00:35:03.560
practices as panaceas, right? As quick fixes. Maslow called them quick hits of transcendence. He was
00:35:10.280
very much against that. He thought self-actualization took a lot of work. And he actually was very,
00:35:16.360
very wary of psychedelics. Did he take psychedelics?
00:35:20.360
No, no, he didn't. That's interesting. I mean, he was surrounded by people
00:35:25.640
who were both the major researchers and proponents of psychedelics at that time. So he must have just
00:35:33.960
decided based on some reasons why not to. What were those reasons? I don't remember encountering
00:35:40.040
Yeah. He used to rib a lot with Timothy Leary and there's a famous story of them walking
00:35:45.960
together at Harvard Square and Maslow saying something like, you know, would you want to
00:35:50.040
take an elevator to the top of Mount Everest? You know? And, you know, so he was like teasing him
00:35:55.320
about LSDs being a shortcut. And Maslow very much viewed it as a shortcut. And I read all these letters
00:36:00.600
that he had wrote in personal correspondence to various people about his thoughts on LSD.
00:36:06.040
But during that same conversation, there was a time where I think they were exhausted from walking
00:36:11.400
and Maslow said, should we get a taxi or something? And then Timothy Leary kind of made fun of him as
00:36:15.880
well. He said, I thought you said you didn't want any shortcuts. So anyway, that was funny kind of
00:36:19.960
joking back and forth. But yeah, Maslow really was trying to hold off on that because he really
00:36:24.680
railed against these easy answers to self-actualization. He really viewed self-actualization as being
00:36:30.760
committed to a calling or something deep within yourself that you love, that brings out the best
00:36:37.720
in you, and that you are committed to working towards day in and day out. He very much was
00:36:43.560
in that sort of meaning mode, similar to Viktor Frankl. And there's some fascinating discussions
00:36:48.440
between Viktor Frankl and Maslow about meaning and their similarities and differences about their
00:36:53.480
way of thinking about that. But he really railed against it. And he would kind of go back and forth
00:36:59.080
like in his book on peak experiences in religion. He says something to the effect, well, I know
00:37:05.880
psychedelics is becoming popular now and this may scientifically someday show to have benefits. But he was
00:37:12.360
very tentative about it. I think if he were alive today and he saw the science and saw a lot of the
00:37:18.040
positive benefits, I actually think he'd change his mind a little bit and would be a bit more excited.
00:37:26.440
I haven't. I haven't. I'm like Maslow in that sense.
00:37:30.520
Well, I personally have always been prone biologically, dispositionally to hypomania,
00:37:38.520
which is not the same as manic and sort of bipolar. Actually, hypomania is a personality trait
00:37:45.560
that we all vary on. It's correlated with schizotypy. And this is actually what led into a
00:37:50.440
whole rabbit hole of research I've been conducting on schizotypy and its relationship to creativity
00:37:55.400
and how in some sense it can be related to schizophrenia. But I've been really interested
00:37:59.640
in that paradox of when does it tip over to schizophrenia versus when does it tip over
00:38:08.440
I've been prone to this kind of, you know, like I can see beauty somewhere and then just
00:38:12.200
start crying, you know, over it. And without psychedelics, I'm kind of scared. I want to do
00:38:19.640
it with someone that's a good guide, you know, or someone who's really experienced with it.
00:38:24.600
Because I'm kind of scared of, of being high and then, or being kind of having this wonderful
00:38:29.240
experience. And then can you have too much of, of this kind of transcendent experience where it
00:38:36.200
Yeah. Oh yeah. You certainly can. And I think being, I don't know much about hypomania, but I can
00:38:43.480
imagine just wanting to be cautious if you feel like there's something that if you have a concern that
00:38:49.560
you could be destabilized in some way that wouldn't be healthy. Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, for
00:38:55.320
instance, someone who has a greater than normal reason to worry that they might be prone to
00:39:02.120
schizophrenia. That's a real, I say this without any clinical experience, but just from what I
00:39:07.640
understand of the literature, that that seems like a contra indication for certainly psychedelic,
00:39:12.920
real psychedelics. So, you know, I would leave MDMA aside, but LSD, psilocybin, mescaline,
00:39:18.600
you know, DMT, I think you would be wise to at the very least be cautious there if there's any kind
00:39:25.400
of clinical risk in the offing. Yeah. I mean, for me, the utility of psychedelics, and I guess this
00:39:33.400
does relate somewhat, you wrote an article on mindfulness that I also wanted to talk about,
00:39:38.120
and it relates to your take on meditation there. There are many reasons to take psychedelics,
00:39:44.440
but that for me, the most, the one that applies to most people, and I think the one that, that
00:39:49.560
integrates most directly with this larger project of getting to Everest by the means of growth rather
00:39:56.280
than the elevator that takes you up there and then you promptly die of exposure or hypoxia. It's that
00:40:04.120
without having had certain experiences, you really have no sense of how limited your normal experience
00:40:12.600
is. This is in terms of affect and cognition and the ethical implications of both. I mean,
00:40:19.160
it's just, you have no, you just don't know what, how confined the prison of your mind is,
00:40:24.680
or even that it is a prison, until you've, one of the walls has been broken down for you and you've
00:40:30.680
seen some vast horizon that you didn't even imagine existed. Or even if you did, even if you paid lip
00:40:36.840
service to the possibility, you just didn't know what it would be like to confront it. And I guess
00:40:42.920
the analogy that works for me is, I mean, to think of mental training and meditation as a species of
00:40:49.000
that, somewhat analogous to physical training. And, and, you know, physical training is obviously
00:40:53.880
something we, it's a thing. We, we know it's uncontroversial that you can get stronger and more
00:40:58.680
flexible and improve your balance. And I mean, you can become an Olympic gymnast, right? And so
00:41:05.640
everyone who begins working out does it in a context that they know that while they may not become
00:41:13.320
an Olympic gymnast, they know just how far this can be taken. You know, when you're just struggling
00:41:19.240
to touch your toes or do one pull-up or one push-up because you've been sedentary for the last 10 years,
00:41:25.080
you know that extraordinary transformations of the body are possible. And then the question is just
00:41:31.160
how far are you going to take this? How dissatisfied are you going to be with your inability to do much
00:41:38.120
of anything? And how inspired are you going to be by, you know, watching the Olympics or, you know,
00:41:44.040
seeing pictures of people who have completely transformed their bodies? And the problem with,
00:41:49.560
with the contemplative life and meditation and other tools is that the changes are for the most
00:41:55.560
part invisible. It's not that they don't have emotional correlates and therefore behavioral ones.
00:42:00.760
And, and that's why the rampages of various gurus seem to be disqualifying of the whole project.
00:42:07.080
But for the most part, this is an, an inner landscape and therefore a hidden one. And
00:42:14.280
therefore all we have is the testimony of people to say how far this landscape actually goes. And so
00:42:22.200
you can't see the gold medal floor exercise at the Olympics to prove beyond any possibility of doubt
00:42:29.960
that it is possible to take the project of becoming stronger and more flexible and
00:42:34.840
getting greater balance and all that. I mean, you can take it to a level of perfection
00:42:39.000
that you wouldn't otherwise be able to imagine, right? And so with psychedelics,
00:42:45.160
it's a little bit like suddenly being dropped in to the gold medal routine of the floor exercise.
00:42:51.240
Modulo, a few ways this analogy breaks down. I mean, it's not that everything you can experience
00:42:56.440
on psychedelics is normative or, you know, worth getting by some other route. I mean,
00:43:01.000
you can experience things that are terrifying and, and clearly not normative. But if you,
00:43:06.440
if you hit the sweet spot on LSD or psilocybin or, you know, MDMA, again, not, not a classic psychedelic,
00:43:13.880
but it shows you a different room in the mansion of understanding, if you hit any of those sweet
00:43:19.880
spots that do in their, within their purview seem normative, if you experience something like
00:43:25.880
unconditional love on MDMA, or you experience self-transcending unity with nature, we'll say,
00:43:34.280
on psilocybin, it is like, you know, experiencing physical perfection, you know, of a sort that,
00:43:42.200
you know, only the most highly trained athlete would ever touch, and you're just dropped into
00:43:47.160
it. And then you, then you lose it again, you come down, but you realize, okay, that's possible.
00:43:53.800
Even though you can forget it on a, you know, day by day basis, you have seen something that you,
00:43:58.520
you know, there's a there there. And then the question is, what are you going to do about it?
00:44:02.680
And then, then meditation, if you take it up as a practice, can be practiced in the context of
00:44:08.600
knowing that this is not a false project, right? Just knowing that it's, when someone says they've
00:44:13.800
had this kind of experience, you know, from within that this is an actual potential of the human mind,
00:44:20.440
you know, and therefore the human brain, and there's no reason why it couldn't be a potential
00:44:25.000
of yours, given the right changes. So that's, the virtue is in, again, it's not the only virtue, but
00:44:32.200
for me, the primary virtue is, is almost rhetorical. It's the only thing that would
00:44:37.720
have convinced a skeptic like me that there was a path to go anywhere, really. You know,
00:44:43.640
that's its utility. Again, there, we could talk about other things that it does for people, but
00:44:47.880
for me, it, it is the, the perfect rejoinder to the otherwise necessary skepticism, which is, you know,
00:44:55.480
because again, we're surrounded on all sides by bullshit, you know, things that are clearly
00:44:59.560
bullshit. And it's hard to find the diamond in the bag of glass. And yeah, psychedelics can help
00:45:05.640
you distinguish the two. Yeah, there's a lot there. And I really enjoy listening to your
00:45:10.120
experiences. I enjoy listening to other people's experiences. We often, we can intellectualize this
00:45:14.520
stuff as much as we want, but until we actually experience it, we sometimes don't fully understand
00:45:18.760
something to be the case. And I'm really impressed with the scientific research that's coming out on
00:45:23.880
that psychedelics in combination with spiritual practices show the greatest effects like meditation,
00:45:31.320
but also prayer. There's some new studies, large scale studies that show that the combination is
00:45:36.440
better than either alone. And so the more you can integrate those psychedelic experiences into the
00:45:42.840
rest of your life, the more productive it'll be. But you know, what's interesting to me though,
00:45:49.320
is that there's lots of different routes to this, this certain transcendent state of being,
00:45:54.360
there's lots of different routes. I'm wondering, is psychedelics, is that, do you think there's
00:45:59.560
nothing else practices that can take us to that same, to those same insights? What are your thoughts
00:46:06.360
on that? It depends which insights and experiences you're talking about. I mean, it's really, it's a Venn
00:46:13.080
diagram for me, which in certain cases barely overlaps between what is, you know, the real purpose of
00:46:22.920
meditation or the kinds of experiences people can have in meditation and really the essence of it. I
00:46:28.520
mean, the real utility of it and the, the kinds of experiences people can have on psychedelics. The way
00:46:34.280
I distinguish them is that there's consciousness and its contents and almost any attempt, you know,
00:46:42.520
successful or otherwise to change experience is a matter of changing the contents of consciousness.
00:46:49.160
That is really the goal. And you know, whether it's thought about in those terms or not, and
00:46:54.520
that is the effect. And you know, by definition, all of these changes are temporary. You know, so you can
00:47:00.040
have a peak experience through taking psychedelics. You can have a peak experience through, you know,
00:47:06.360
going on a meditation retreat and meditating for 14 hours a day for a month. And these kinds of
00:47:13.720
experiences can be pretty similar. The difference with psychedelics is you're guaranteed to have a
00:47:20.280
radical change in the contents of your consciousness. And it's guaranteed to happen more or less within the
00:47:26.440
hour, right? So it's like if someone gives you an effective dose of LSD or psilocybin,
00:47:32.920
there's no question something's going to happen right now. It may be a terrifying something, but
00:47:38.600
if nothing else, it will prove to you that experience is a highly plastic thing and it is
00:47:45.880
possible to inhabit states of consciousness that you never dreamed were possible a mere hour ago.
00:47:53.640
And again, you can get there with meditation and you can get there in a much more orderly way
00:47:59.000
without the downside. I mean, some people can go crazy on a meditation retreat as well. So you know,
00:48:04.680
it's not that there's no risk, but it's not the same kind of spin of the roulette wheel where you're
00:48:09.560
really not sure what you're going to get until you get it, all your attempts to control set and setting,
00:48:15.240
notwithstanding. So it is more orderly and it can go into very rarefied terrain.
00:48:24.040
But the actual sweet spot for meditation, which is to say the transcendence that actually matters,
00:48:29.960
is something that you can recognize about the nature of consciousness in any moment that's
00:48:35.800
coincident with any contents. You don't actually need the pyrotechnics of the psychedelic experience or
00:48:43.000
even the pyrotechnics of changes in state born of intense concentration and meditation to recognize this
00:48:50.680
thing about the nature of consciousness. And you know, this thing is referred to by many names,
00:48:55.640
but it's cutting through the illusion of the self or recognizing emptiness or non-duality. I mean,
00:49:01.400
there are many sort of facets by which you could talk about it, but it's the loss of this sense of
00:49:05.720
subject-object perception. It's the, and this is completely coincident with ordinary perception,
00:49:13.400
you can drive a car in this state of consciousness.
00:49:15.640
This is a perfectly functional state because it's not actually a state. I mean, this is the way
00:49:21.720
consciousness is when you're no longer constructing this sense of being the center of consciousness.
00:49:30.520
To speak of it in representational terms, it's like you can represent the world without representing
00:49:37.800
a subject in your head, in your body, in the world. Most people have this additional sense that there's
00:49:45.560
a homunculus in the head that's doing the thinking and the feeling and the reacting. And that can be
00:49:52.360
taken offline and how that relates to neurophysiology or what the default mode network is doing. I mean,
00:49:58.440
that's an open question, but you know, based on the current literature, it seems like it's probably
00:50:05.160
at least part of what the default mode network is doing. In addition to just producing mind-wandering or
00:50:12.280
daydreaming or just random thinking, there's a strain of thinking that is explicitly self-referential.
00:50:19.240
And again, I don't know if this has actually been studied, but more than just self-referential thought,
00:50:23.960
there's the difference between noticing thought as an appearance in consciousness among all the other
00:50:30.920
appearances and being identified with thought, which is to say thinking without knowing that you're
00:50:35.720
thinking. And that's the subtlest entanglement with thought, which does give this feeling of subject
00:50:41.800
in the head, being the thinker. And so meditation can break that spell, and breaking that identification
00:50:49.640
leaves everything else untouched. Now, it is in fact true that the more you do that, and the longer
00:50:55.640
those moments of true non-duality or perception of emptiness last, then that does begin to change
00:51:03.800
the character of the contents of consciousness as well, right? So that can begin to, you know, seem
00:51:10.360
more rarefied and more psychedelic and more dreamlike. That's where some of that explicitly mystical
00:51:16.680
language can come into even this sort of discussion, but it's never the point, and it's never the thing
00:51:23.400
you're trying to maximize. And in fact, when you begin to practice in this non-dual way, it's explicitly
00:51:29.960
part of the instruction that you need to break your attachment to any of those changes in consciousness
00:51:36.600
that you think are a sign of something good happening. I mean, this is where the being mode versus
00:51:42.360
the becoming mode or the being mode versus the deficiency mode, you know, which isn't your
00:51:47.400
terminology. That's where that emphasis as a matter of practice becomes the entire game, right? Which
00:51:55.160
is if being is really the point, if you've recognized something about the nature of consciousness that
00:52:01.960
cannot be improved, it neither admits of being improved or suggests that there's any need to improve
00:52:08.600
it. And it's compatible with anything else that can be noticed as the contents of consciousness.
00:52:14.920
It's compatible with noticing physical pain or an ugly thought or anything that might arise.
00:52:22.680
Well, then it's at that point, it's not a matter of changing anything. It's a matter of continuing to
00:52:28.520
notice this quality of consciousness, which is its centerlessness, its openness, its clarity.
00:52:34.440
It's, and then anything that changes, I mean, the feeling of, you know, joy or the feeling of bliss.
00:52:39.720
I mean, anything that becomes for most people, certainly in the beginning of meditation,
00:52:44.280
a sign that meditation is actually working, all of that gets disavowed as an appearance in a dream
00:52:51.000
that is meaningless. It has no meaning at that point. The fact that you suddenly feel good,
00:52:56.280
that's not the point of meditation. And in that sense, most of what people experience with
00:53:02.200
psychedelics, just the experience of being bowled over by incredibly intense and, you know, often
00:53:08.680
very positive experience, right? Bliss and seeing colors of a sort, you know, colors in the natural
00:53:15.000
world that you never imagined possible and a feeling that the energy of your body is inseparable from
00:53:21.080
the energy of the world and, you know, the energetics of all of that. Whatever the knob is in the brain
00:53:25.640
that, you know, somewhere near the nucleus accumbens that you can grab and turn up to 11,
00:53:29.720
well, then it got turned up to 12 there. And none of that is ultimately the point, right? None of that
00:53:36.680
can be the point. And yet it, again, it's the thing that if you've never experienced it,
00:53:42.840
you know, you're someone who just can't imagine how different a human experience can be. And that
00:53:48.280
lack of imagination becomes the reason why you are satisfied with Netflix and not hating your life.
00:53:56.680
You get up each day and merely repeat that project. I don't know if that answered your question, but it
00:54:01.800
gets somewhat paradoxical in terms of trying to equate what the project is from the point of view
00:54:08.520
of meditation and the utility of psychedelics. Yeah, it was really elucidating. I really appreciated
00:54:15.160
that. I'm trying to square that away from way with something you said earlier about you kind of were
00:54:21.640
pushing back against, when I said transcenders, they live for peak experiences. You were kind of
00:54:28.120
doubtful or criticizing that's a, that's a worthy project. You noted how peak experiences were so
00:54:33.160
ephemeral. And yet now you're talking about, you're advocating for these kind of LSD type experiences that
00:54:40.840
are ephemeral. Only in so far as they can get you to be sufficiently interested in something deeper
00:54:48.680
than what you're tending to experience by the happenstance of your own conditioning, right? So
00:54:53.640
like we've all been conditioned by culture to think certain things are possible and to hope for certain
00:54:59.560
outcomes in our lives. And we're continually having various states of consciousness advertised to us as
00:55:07.160
desirable and take the hull of the boat that we're, we're trying to shore up. You know, we, you know,
00:55:13.640
we, we all have various self-esteem needs say, and needs for belonging and, and connection. And then the
00:55:22.840
fulfillment of those needs get advertised to us and modulated by culture. So what does self-esteem mean
00:55:29.000
now? Well, it means something different than in, you know, the 1980s before anyone had even heard of
00:55:35.240
social media, you know, or imagined that such a thing was possible. Now it means something online
00:55:41.800
and we're all trying to navigate the consequences of that. So I would say that the role of a, a peak
00:55:48.840
experience, which again, by definition is going to come and go like every experience, is, is to convince
00:55:56.600
you that there's, that there's more to the landscape of mind than you may have assumed and which you're
00:56:02.920
tacitly assuming by prioritizing the way you're, you're spending your time and attention in the way
00:56:09.320
that you are, right? I mean, like if you might not think that you, you have, you know, bounded the horizon
00:56:16.600
of your aspirations so narrowly, but if you're spending more or less every moment of your life
00:56:23.320
just trying to come out on the winning side of a skirmish on Twitter and eke out a few more
00:56:30.600
publications and earn 50 percent more money than you did last year, right? Like if that is taking up
00:56:37.800
90 percent of a person's bandwidth, well, you know, embedded in that use of energy and attention are
00:56:44.680
certain assumptions about what will be ultimately satisfying. And, you know, this is a very common
00:56:50.120
experience to arrive at the fulfillment of all of that. You know, you make a little more money,
00:56:54.280
you publish a little more, your snark lands appropriately on Twitter.
00:57:03.320
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