The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:57.420 Hello everybody. I have the pleasure today of talking with my colleague at the University of Toronto, Dr. John Verveke.

00:01:16.060 We've discussed much, many times on my podcast and in public, and so it's a continuation of a conversation that's been going on for a very long time.

00:01:28.000 We concluded today with the proposition that we're both working on the edge of what you might describe as the counter-enlightenment,

00:01:35.800 which I suppose is the endeavor to place what would you say.

00:01:43.560 Cognitive processes that have gone too astray into the abstract and representational back on their feet,

00:01:51.160 to rediscover the sacred, to rediscover what's deep and meaningful,

00:01:55.480 to rectify the meaning crisis as a consequence of that rediscovery and new discovery.

00:02:02.180 And we delve farther into that today.

00:02:05.100 So, welcome aboard.

00:02:07.320 Hopefully it's useful, practically and metaphysically.

00:02:10.400 Happy New Year, Dr. Verveke.

00:02:14.000 Happy New Year, Jordan.

00:02:15.220 Good to see you.

00:02:16.000 It's good to see you too. You're looking really good.

00:02:17.900 Thank you, sir. I've been worse.

00:02:21.760 Yeah, yeah. Well, lots of exciting things on the horizon for this year.

00:02:25.980 That's for sure. It's going to be a crazy year.

00:02:28.080 Yeah. Very busy for me too.

00:02:30.040 Good. What are you up to? What are you working on intellectually?

00:02:32.800 A whole bunch of book chapters and papers, presentations, and then also doing preparation.

00:02:41.780 I go on sabbatical on the 25th and I'm going to film my next big series in January 2025, I meant to say.

00:02:51.780 I'm going to go on sabbatical and I'm going to film my next big series.

00:02:55.180 And so I'm doing lots of planning and prep for that too.

00:02:57.440 So you go on sabbatical January 2025?

00:02:59.820 Yes.

00:03:00.620 Uh-huh. And what are you hoping to accomplish on your sabbatical?

00:03:03.760 Like I said, there's two main things I want to do.

00:03:06.280 The main thing is I want to film my next big series and this is going to entail me going on location.

00:03:12.900 So it's called Walking the Philosophical Silk Road and it's about trying to resurrect what the Silk Road was at one point,

00:03:20.960 which was sort of a shared passageway and also a shared lingua philosophica so that people from East and West could dialogue with each other in mutually transformative fashions.

00:03:34.060 I'll sort of be starting in Europe and tracing out sort of the Neoplatonic tradition and then starting in Japan and Kyoto and tracing out the Zen tradition

00:03:44.020 and then getting the two of these to sort of meet somewhere in San Marcan and have a deep dialogue.

00:03:49.140 It's kind of my quest to try and make myself as available as possible to what I think is happening right now,

00:03:54.880 which is a new advent of the sacred as a response to the meeting crisis.

00:04:00.300 New, okay, two things there.

00:04:02.460 New advent of the sacred.

00:04:03.740 We're going to talk about that for sure.

00:04:06.300 How are you managing this practically, this enterprise?

00:04:10.000 Well, I mean, I do have the time off for the sabbatical and the Raviki Foundation is raising money for it.

00:04:19.320 We've already lined up some people.

00:04:21.620 I have people in the Raviki Foundation that are working on it because music is going to pay a big role.

00:04:27.320 Animation is going to pay a big role.

00:04:29.600 I'm going to try and pick up on what I'm calling the geophilosophy.

00:04:32.220 Like if I go to, let's say I'm doing Eckhart, you know, I go to Germany, try to pick up some of the ambience of his time and what's going on there.

00:04:43.820 So the idea is provoked by sort of East and West.

00:04:49.740 Tillich's famous essay in The Courage to Be where he proposes that we need to somehow make way for what he calls the God beyond the God of theism.

00:04:57.640 And then you have something similar from the Kyoto School represented in Robert Carter's introduction of the Kyoto School to the West, which is the nothingness beyond God.

00:05:07.800 And Zen and Neoplatonism are both doing this.

00:05:12.060 And what's interesting is the possibility for them to interact with each other in a sort of mutually correcting fashion that could afford something coming to birth.

00:05:21.900 No one will own the Silk Road and no one did.

00:05:25.860 It'll be a way in which people can travel between different homes.

00:05:30.100 And so, like I said, the idea is to try and investigate thinkers from Europe, from ancient Persia, India.

00:05:42.840 And to do that on location and to bring that to as wide an audience as possible.

00:05:46.440 Yeah, as much as is safely possible.

00:05:48.260 I mean, there's various places I'd love to go, like Syria, because I want to do Dionysus, the Areopagite.

00:05:55.760 But Syria, of course, is not a place I'm going to travel to right now.

00:05:59.360 But it's so as many places as I can possibly go to.

00:06:02.680 So what's the Verveke Foundation?

00:06:04.020 Oh, so the Verveke Foundation is, well, it's a non-profit, not-for-profit setup in which all the money from Patreon, advertising, donations, books, it all funnels in there.

00:06:21.020 And then I get an honorarium, which is no more than like 25% of the income.

00:06:26.380 And then the rest goes, we have somebody who works full-time, Christopher Mastropietro, who's the executive director.

00:06:33.080 We have a chair, which is Ryan Barton.

00:06:37.720 And Ryan Barton actually came to me.

00:06:39.180 He said that my work had a huge impact on him and he wanted to reciprocate.

00:06:44.220 And he is basically an entrepreneur that helps to set up other businesses.

00:06:50.380 That's what he does, businesses organization.

00:06:52.700 He is a godsend.

00:06:54.440 We have Taylor Barrett, who works sort of 40% for us.

00:06:58.460 He's in charge of all of the practices.

00:07:01.480 We have a platform called Awakened to Meaning where you can go, you can join a meditation session,

00:07:06.560 you can learn how to do dialectic and to dialogos,

00:07:09.080 you can take a bunch of different courses on a bunch of different things.

00:07:11.480 And we have Ethan Say, he manages sort of partnerships.

00:07:17.220 And we have a whole bunch of volunteer people.

00:07:20.020 Right now they're working on a codex.

00:07:22.200 What they're doing is they're going through all of my work and they're creating kind of like a wiki

00:07:30.000 at many different levels of access, a very academic level, sort of first year university, high school level.

00:07:37.320 Have you tried doing that with AI?

00:07:39.340 We're going to be using some AI with it.

00:07:41.480 And I've also got somebody who did it previously for me for a couple of the courses I taught at U of T.

00:07:47.840 So, you know, the course you taught for Peterson Academy.

00:07:50.440 So, the man who's working on our large language model systems has taken the transcriptions of all those courses

00:07:57.200 and you'll be able to ask the course a question.

00:08:01.900 Good.

00:08:02.220 Right.

00:08:02.840 And so, the same could be done with all your work, right?

00:08:05.400 Yeah.

00:08:05.540 So, you'll have a...

00:08:06.880 So, one of my...

00:08:08.760 Victor, again, he did this for me recently on the basis of this book that I've been writing.

00:08:15.040 And now I can take everything I've written.

00:08:17.260 So, I've written a lot of commentary on biblical chapters.

00:08:20.120 Now I can take a story or a narrative fragment that I haven't analyzed and I can ask the AI to interpret it.

00:08:31.060 And it'll interpret it on the basis of the work that I've already done in the book.

00:08:35.020 And I've been playing with it.

00:08:36.240 We only put it together in the last two weeks.

00:08:38.060 I've been playing with it in the last two weeks.

00:08:39.700 And it's not rare for that system to be able to crack a verse that I didn't understand.

00:08:47.740 So, this is a very weird thing to play with, right?

00:08:50.200 Because, at least in principle, it's predicated on thoughts I've already had.

00:08:54.720 Although, obviously, it's predicated on the statistical relationship between thoughts I've had.

00:08:57.980 Yeah, it's pretty good to turn into a model.

00:08:59.220 Yeah, yeah.

00:08:59.920 And so, it's really...

00:09:01.680 Well, it's an uncanny thing to interact with, actually.

00:09:04.240 It also brings up very interesting questions in relationship to plagiarism.

00:09:10.100 So, you know, if you build an AI on your own thought, and then you use it to generate a new paragraph, do you have to cite that?

00:09:18.400 Is that you?

00:09:19.560 The university is wrestling with this, right?

00:09:21.100 Well, yeah.

00:09:22.980 By the time they're done wrestling with it, there'll be another problem that's so profound compared to it that it'll make it look trivial.

00:09:30.540 Yeah, I have a popular book out called Mentoring the Machine that's coming out in serial form.

00:09:36.260 The first two are out, in which I'm trying...

00:09:38.680 What's the title?

00:09:39.840 Mentoring the Machine.

00:09:40.620 Mentoring the Machine.

00:09:41.520 Oh, yeah.

00:09:42.080 I'm trying to deal with what's the scientific import, the philosophical import, the spiritual import of these machines.

00:09:49.260 Not so much making predictions, because many of the predictions have already been falsified, both the doomers and the zoomers.

00:09:54.760 But more about what are some of the thresholds that we'll be facing, decision points, in which we'll have to decide if we want to make these machines more rational, more agentic in nature, etc.

00:10:06.540 And hopefully get people's awareness into the big picture so we can confront these thresholds with sort of more rational thought and reflection.

00:10:18.560 So, is the Verveke Foundation a simpler alternative to grants?

00:10:27.360 Yeah.

00:10:28.560 I know that's really something for that to be true.

00:10:32.420 It is.

00:10:33.060 I mean, we do fund some experiment.

00:10:34.440 I mean, I do have the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Lab running at UFTM.

00:10:39.260 We've got several grant proposals in.

00:10:41.380 So, I'm doing both.

00:10:42.360 I'm trying to get some grants for the more pure academic stuff.

00:10:46.560 And then the Verveke Foundation funds some of the academic stuff, but it funds a lot of the, I don't know what to call it, all the public stuff.

00:10:53.660 The other function, it has...

00:10:55.300 The more educational.

00:10:56.340 The more educational, the more public-facing, the more practice-oriented, not just generating theory, things like that.

00:11:03.480 Right, right.

00:11:04.960 So, they go together well.

00:11:06.900 I hope so.

00:11:08.100 And I mean, the job, that's the outward-facing job of the Foundation.

00:11:11.580 The inward-facing job of the Foundation is to try and keep me as virtuously oriented towards all of this as possible.

00:11:19.200 So, to keep me sort of arm's length from, I don't know what to call it, the influence or fame, the money, things like that.

00:11:26.240 How people around me who are sort of helping me to not vacillate between inflation and despair, that kind of thing.

00:11:36.680 Yeah, well, you're obviously in a position now where you should be surrounded by competent people who are ensuring that they can do what they can do, and you can be freed up to do what you can do.

00:11:49.340 Yeah, yeah.

00:11:50.240 Yeah, well, that's a great opportunity if you have it.

00:11:52.640 I do.

00:11:53.060 Well, and I've had people that, well, I currently do have people that I deeply trust.

00:11:58.520 It's been challenging for me.

00:12:01.800 I mean, I'm highly introverted by nature, and I'm an academic, so I'm used to having my control over even the minutia of what I'm doing.

00:12:09.040 And I've had to learn to step back and not feel exposed and to let people do things.

00:12:17.820 But I've found a joy in that that I didn't expect because, you know, unless you're a psychopath, right, it's wonderful to see something grow beyond your grasp.

00:12:27.560 Right, definitely.

00:12:28.340 It really is.

00:12:28.980 And what I've been seeing people do with the foundation and the projects they've come up with, and I've just been continually impressed and very grateful.

00:12:40.500 Yeah, well, that's good evidence for the non-zero-sum nature of a, what would you say, well-run and deep enterprise.

00:12:48.220 There's no shortage of things for people to do.

00:12:50.900 It also highlights the incredible importance of personnel selection and also of stepping back.

00:12:59.540 Like, you want to hire the right people, and they should be people who are, well, certainly, they should be able to do things you can't do, and they should be able to do them faster than you would do them, and they should be freeing you up to do the things that only you can do.

00:13:16.820 But then the advantage to them is, they can have their own fiefdom that's real.

00:13:22.140 The advantage to you in stepping away from micromanagement is, well, do you want to micromanage, or do you want to go do some things that are interesting?

00:13:28.700 Yeah, yeah.

00:13:29.160 Right, right.

00:13:30.380 Yeah.

00:13:31.140 Well, I can say in all those things you just articulated, I'm very grateful that that's the case for me.

00:13:37.260 All of that's happening for me.

00:13:38.400 And so the foundation, like, one of the things it does is it obviously helps fund the staff, but it funds a lot of these programs.

00:13:46.240 Many are free, some are paid.

00:13:48.360 Yeah.

00:13:49.040 But it's also raising funds.

00:13:50.640 We do fundraising for specific things, like I'm going to be doing fundraising for Walking the Philosophical Silk Road.

00:13:56.700 Right, right.

00:13:57.420 So how can people find out about the foundation?

00:14:00.420 Well, we have a website, the Verveke Foundation.

00:14:02.480 They can go there right away.

00:14:03.340 There we go.

00:14:03.560 Is that a .com site?

00:14:04.640 Yeah, I believe so, yeah.

00:14:05.840 Okay, okay, okay.

00:14:07.900 So, hey, so speaking, let's turn a bit from the practical to the intellectual.

00:14:16.020 I've got an idea about the sacred that I want to run by you.

00:14:20.260 Sure.

00:14:20.660 Technically.

00:14:21.940 Well, imagine that you have a hierarchy of thinkers such that this would exist over time.

00:14:33.340 Okay.

00:14:33.620 Such that some thinkers have more thinkers dependent on them than other thinkers, right?

00:14:42.160 So they're more seminal, right?

00:14:44.360 You'd get a rough approximation of that with citation counts in the scientific endeavor.

00:14:49.920 And citation counts are a pretty good index of quality as well as quantity, at least compared

00:14:57.860 to every other index that we have.

00:14:59.280 So you can imagine a dependency structure among thinkers so that, obviously, a thinker like

00:15:04.320 Milton would be of primary depth.

00:15:09.060 And Shakespeare, the people who are part of the canon.

00:15:12.420 And so, rather than conceptualizing the canon as a consequence of the arbitrary decisions

00:15:18.800 of arbiters of taste, let's say, you could say that the canon is the consequence of the

00:15:26.480 cumulative impact of a thinker's thoughts moving forward.

00:15:30.780 And some thinkers are more key than others.

00:15:34.600 My sense, for example, and there's historical reasons for this, obviously, that the biblical

00:15:39.460 corpus stands at the bottom of the Western canon.

00:15:42.740 And then there are thinkers who have their foot, feet placed firmly in that tradition, Dante,

00:15:50.100 Milton, Shakespeare, et cetera.

00:15:51.920 And then a branching structure above all that.

00:15:57.100 Okay, so it's a matter of dependency.

00:15:59.240 And so, how fundamental a given thought is, is dependent on how many other thoughts are

00:16:06.780 dependent on it for its validity.

00:16:09.160 Okay, now this works out neuropsychologically too.

00:16:11.540 So, imagine that you have a Janoff-Balman who talked about trauma has a theory that's analogous

00:16:18.920 to this.

00:16:19.320 And I think it fits in well with the entropy control theories of Friston.

00:16:23.260 So, then imagine that your perceptions and therefore your emotional regulation are dependent

00:16:29.780 upon a nested sequence of assumptions.

00:16:34.040 And a given phenomenon can violate an assumption.

00:16:38.740 And the degree of entropy that's produced by the assumption violation is proportionate

00:16:43.820 to the depth of the assumption.

00:16:46.080 Right, right.

00:16:46.740 So, Janoff-Balman talks about, for example, her model of trauma is shattered assumption,

00:16:52.240 the deeper the assumption.

00:16:53.200 So, for example, one way you can be traumatized in a marital relationship is through the discovery

00:16:58.140 of infidelity.

00:16:59.160 Yeah, yeah.

00:16:59.660 Right.

00:17:00.240 Your hyperpriors get destroyed.

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00:18:40.440 Yeah, so what do you call them?

00:18:42.420 Hyperpriors.

00:18:43.100 In the Bayesian brain framework, in Fristan's framework, the sort of priors that you use to

00:18:47.760 run.

00:18:47.960 You need a Bayesian approximation.

00:18:50.200 I actually don't like using the Bayesian math because you don't actually run the math.

00:18:54.100 You run a dynamical system approximation.

00:18:57.020 But that's how they talk about it in the literature.

00:18:59.420 Yeah.

00:18:59.780 These are sort of your most, these are the things that are applied in your predictive

00:19:05.060 modeling in the most context-invariant manner.

00:19:08.100 So they apply.

00:19:08.460 Yeah, right.

00:19:09.000 Context-invariant.

00:19:09.900 Right, right.

00:19:10.360 Well, that's another way of thinking about it, too, is that something more fundamental applies

00:19:14.740 across more situations and time spans.

00:19:16.740 Right, okay, okay.

00:19:18.200 So here's a secondary consequence of that, I think.

00:19:21.300 So then imagine that the degree to which you can handle entropy emerging as a consequence

00:19:28.860 of the violation of your assumptions is proportionate to your social status.

00:19:32.800 Okay, and the reason for that is that the better your reputation and therefore the better your

00:19:40.280 situation in the social environment happens to be, the more resources you can bring to

00:19:45.700 bear on a problem if one emerges.

00:19:47.140 Okay, now imagine your serotonin system indexes that, because we know serotonin is one of the systems

00:19:53.640 that's implicated in the relationship between social status and emotional regulation.

00:19:59.260 Sure.

00:19:59.360 So now, the serotonin system has inputs into the memory systems that have this hyperdependency

00:20:07.060 structure, and they're a tuner.

00:20:10.080 And so that for, you imagine, disruption would be characterized in terms of its estimated magnitude

00:20:16.040 by the depth of the presumption that was being violated.

00:20:18.920 Sure.

00:20:19.100 And then there's a control mechanism off to the side of that, such that the more tenuous

00:20:24.140 your grip on the social environment is, the higher the level of negative emotion that's

00:20:29.080 produced in relationship to the violation of a given level of assumption.

00:20:34.000 Sure.

00:20:34.420 Right, okay, okay.

00:20:35.340 So that makes sense to you.

00:20:36.920 That seems to be reasonable.

00:20:37.960 So far, very clear, yes.

00:20:38.660 Yeah, okay, okay, okay.

00:20:40.600 Okay, good.

00:20:41.420 Okay, well, so then I've been working, well, I'm writing, as I mentioned, a book on

00:20:47.480 Explication of Biblical Narrative.

00:20:50.580 It's called We Who Wrestle with God, and I've been working with-

00:20:53.300 Oh, nice pun on Israel.

00:20:54.720 Yes, yes, right, exactly, exactly.

00:20:57.200 And I discovered that relationship when I did the lectures on Genesis in 2017.

00:21:03.080 So I've been trying to come up with a technical definition of the sacred, right?

00:21:09.720 And this is relevant to research on awe, too.

00:21:12.700 So the deeper you go, the closer you get to the sacred.

00:21:16.460 And I'm speaking as a matter of definition here.

00:21:20.120 So as you move down your assumption hierarchy and you get to these, you call them hyper-priors.

00:21:24.920 Yeah.

00:21:25.320 The closer you get to the ultimate hyper-prior, the more you're walking on sacred ground.

00:21:35.020 And that's a technical definition.

00:21:36.800 Now, if you encounter something that shifts you in a hyper-prior, and that's a positive

00:21:41.640 encounter, that's going to produce a corresponding sensation of awe, right?

00:21:46.040 And I would say that's probably a dopaminergically mediated revelation of possibility.

00:21:51.280 Okay, so let me run something else by you and tell me what you think about this.

00:21:54.700 Okay, so I've been conceptualizing the sacred as a process, too.

00:21:59.160 So there's a spirit in the Old Testament that's characterized as Yahweh.

00:22:02.920 And the theory in the corpus is that whatever this central spirit is makes itself manifest

00:22:08.600 in a number of different guises.

00:22:10.160 So for Noah, for example, God is the spirit that calls the wise to prepare when the flood

00:22:16.380 is coming.

00:22:17.380 And for Abraham, God is the call of the spirit of adventure.

00:22:21.420 And so you see these juxtapositions of narratives that shed a different light on this central

00:22:26.400 spirit with each story.

00:22:28.860 United by the claim that regardless of the surface differences of the manifestation of this spirit,

00:22:34.600 it's reflecting an underlying unity.

00:22:36.420 That's the monotheistic hypothesis, one God underneath all the gods.

00:22:40.720 So a dependency structure that has a fundamental base or a pinnacle, depending on which set of

00:22:47.060 metaphors that you use.

00:22:48.880 So when I wrote Maps of Meaning, I had started to conceptualize the call of the sacred as something

00:22:56.920 like spontaneous interest, right?

00:22:59.440 Is that, well, so things will grip your attention and compel you in a certain direction.

00:23:03.900 I realized later, after I wrote that book, many years later, that that was equivalent to

00:23:09.180 the more traditional notion of calling.

00:23:13.600 And so, and then I think I missed something in Maps of Meaning that's half of the divine,

00:23:18.640 because I really concentrated on interest.

00:23:21.340 And that was sort of under the influence of humanistic psychologists who were oriented towards,

00:23:25.440 say, self-actualization.

00:23:26.560 But there's a corresponding element of conscience.

00:23:31.160 And so there are conceptualizations by Cardinal Newman, for example, of God as the internalized

00:23:39.700 voice of conscience, right?

00:23:41.580 Like the source of the superego, that's another way of thinking about it.

00:23:45.440 But then you could think of Yawa as sort of the dynamic relationship between calling and

00:23:50.560 conscience.

00:23:51.020 And to me, that maps nicely onto positive and negative emotion, because a calling is

00:23:55.520 going to entice you forward with dopaminergically mediated, what would you say, indications of

00:24:01.600 treasure to come.

00:24:02.940 And conscience is going to say, you've deviated off the golden path into the domain of danger,

00:24:09.960 and there's something you should sort out.

00:24:11.620 And then, well, you see quite clearly in the Old Testament corpus, and it also emerges in

00:24:17.240 the New Testament, that there's a dynamic relationship between conscience and calling.

00:24:20.800 And that looks to me like what's conceptualized as the Holy Spirit, that dynamic relationship.

00:24:27.640 Wow, that's a lot.

00:24:28.760 Well, I've been working on this for months, you know.

00:24:31.380 So, yeah.

00:24:32.080 So interesting, because I've been working on this sacred a lot, too.

00:24:38.500 Let me share my thoughts, and I'll share where I think they intersect with yours, but

00:24:42.840 maybe they differ.

00:24:43.620 But I think in a fruitful way.

00:24:44.920 So, first of all, there's sort of, in the literature I've been reading, there's sort

00:24:52.040 of three dimensions that are usually talked about with respect to the sacred.

00:24:57.180 One is ultimacy, which I think you're articulating.

00:25:01.400 And the move you made, and this is a compliment to you, by the way, is the classic move of

00:25:05.780 Neoplatonism, which is called asymmetric dependence.

00:25:07.960 So, what is everything asymmetrically dependent on?

00:25:10.680 That's how you get your ultimate.

00:25:12.520 Yeah.

00:25:12.820 What is that in terms of which everything else is explained or understood?

00:25:15.840 Right.

00:25:16.220 That's ultimacy.

00:25:17.920 And then, two other dimensions of the sacred, which I think you're alluding to.

00:25:23.820 One is axiological, that you love this ultimate.

00:25:29.580 It isn't just an intellectual grasp for you.

00:25:32.120 So, that's the directionality.

00:25:33.340 Yes, and there's a valuing, there's a loving, but the reason why I want to say love rather

00:25:39.720 than just value is love doesn't carry with it necessarily the egocentrism of value, which

00:25:46.440 can be very egocentrically oriented.

00:25:48.340 So, love is...

00:25:48.740 So, would that be, maybe that would be expressed in the Old Testament corpus as part of the

00:25:54.220 covenantal relationship?

00:25:55.480 I think so.

00:25:55.980 Because it's a personal relationship rather than a, what would you say, instrumental relationship.

00:26:01.000 Yeah, Esther Lekap-Meat argues that in her covenantal epistemology and loving to know

00:26:05.780 and how there's this deep bond between knowing God and loving God that you can't separate

00:26:11.600 them.

00:26:12.180 Right.

00:26:12.480 And so, that's conceptualized metaphorically in the guise of a relationship rather than

00:26:16.980 as having something.

00:26:18.120 Oh, yes.

00:26:18.480 It's very much about being in relationship.

00:26:20.640 And that's why I want to use the word love.

00:26:22.260 You can have preferences or even values, but you have to be in love.

00:26:25.660 It's a commitment of the whole self.

00:26:27.140 And so, and the thing about love is it gets you on Plato's pivot point.

00:26:32.160 It involves the whole of the self without being self-involved, which seems to be another

00:26:36.400 dimension of this calling.

00:26:38.320 The sacred doesn't just call your aesthetic interest or your ethical interest or your

00:26:42.120 intellect.

00:26:42.760 It calls you as a complete person.

00:26:46.000 This is one of the things that Tillich emphasized.

00:26:47.960 Speaks to the image of God within.

00:26:49.820 Yes.

00:26:50.780 And, you know, the Christian tradition of the transmutation of the image into the likeness.

00:26:57.960 And so, I think that's the axiological dimension.

00:27:00.900 And then there's the sociological dimension that this loving relationship to what is ultimate

00:27:05.740 is transformative.

00:27:07.840 It's healing.

00:27:08.840 It's redemptive.

00:27:10.220 It's liberating.

00:27:11.220 And so, the reason why this is important is, of course, is this allows the sacred to be

00:27:17.420 found in things that are in non-theistic traditions like Buddhism, the Tao, right?

00:27:23.420 Things like that.

00:27:24.780 So, the first part of what you were talking about, like I said, and again, I think this

00:27:30.500 speaks well of it, is in lines with the classic Neoplatonic proposal of that what we're trying

00:27:37.400 to get in touch with what is most real, we have to get to the ground of intelligibility

00:27:42.200 through looking at asymmetric dependence.

00:27:44.220 This is the notion of the ultimate, the one.

00:27:46.520 Asymmetrical dependence.

00:27:47.440 Is that the terminology that's used?

00:27:49.080 Yeah.

00:27:49.400 Kevin Corrigan uses that when he tries to talk about how Plotinus makes his argument for the

00:27:54.560 one, the ultimate reality within the Neoplatonic system, which gets taken up.

00:28:00.940 Well, one of the ways of sorting through that, as far as I'm concerned, is to note that

00:28:05.600 there's either a unity or there's a plurality, and then to note what the consequences of those

00:28:10.480 are.

00:28:11.040 If there's a plurality, there's inbuilt contradictions in the structure of being and becoming itself,

00:28:16.160 and there's divisiveness that can't be overcome.

00:28:18.740 If there's an ultimate unity, it might be mysterious and ineffable, but it does indicate

00:28:22.640 that all things can be brought together in some sort of harmonious relationship, and that's

00:28:27.280 relevant to human motivation, because if there's a plurality, there's going to be confusion

00:28:32.180 and anxiety, because confusion and anxiety mark a plurality.

00:28:37.340 Well, yeah, this is Kierkegaard's purity of heart is to will one thing.

00:28:42.020 Right, right.

00:28:42.520 And so, but this, again, is a Neoplatonic argument.

00:28:45.160 The idea is, whenever we're understanding something, what we're doing is taking two things

00:28:49.040 and finding a unifying principle, and then if you were to pursue understanding to its depths,

00:28:54.260 you'd get something that, technically speaking, can't be understood, because it is the principle

00:28:58.200 by which all understanding...

00:28:59.340 Everything is understood.

00:29:00.480 Right, right, right, right.

00:29:01.440 So what you'll get is you'll...

00:29:03.860 So it grounds out ineffitability.

00:29:05.400 It grounds out ineffitability, and if you look at, like, Nicholas of Cousa, where it grounds

00:29:10.180 out is, it grounds out in sort of the paradoxical realization that what we consider ultimates,

00:29:17.020 ultimate polarities, are actually somehow stereoscopically transcended.

00:29:21.460 So, for example, even though the term is the one, right, it is understood as being beyond

00:29:27.720 singularity and plurality.

00:29:30.140 It is neither singular nor plural, because it is the basis for that particular kind of

00:29:34.980 intelligibility.

00:29:36.160 It is transcentric.

00:29:37.640 God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

00:29:41.460 Is that Nicholas of Cousa?

00:29:42.780 Well, it was taken up by Nicholas and others, but it was actually...

00:29:47.400 That's a great, that's a great line.

00:29:49.420 Yeah, and well, Nicholas has one that goes with it, that God is within everything but not

00:29:53.960 enclosed and beyond everything but not excluded.

00:29:56.880 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, right.

00:29:58.540 And so that's ultimacy, and then the idea is, and this comes from Yadin's work and some

00:30:05.220 of my own work, when people come into relationship to that which they consider more real, the

00:30:09.860 really real, they take on this loving relationship in that they seek to transform their identities

00:30:14.780 and their lives.

00:30:16.100 You suppose that's a marker for the validity of the encounter?

00:30:19.300 Like, if you stumble across something that entices you into a relationship of love, is

00:30:24.860 that actually a reliable ontological marker, let's say?

00:30:28.940 Well, I think if two things line up, yes, I think the answer is yes.

00:30:32.560 I think that's an excellent question.

00:30:34.400 I think if you get the reciprocal opening that's found in love, for example, you know,

00:30:39.900 I have a wonderful partner, and I've come to understand that there's something about

00:30:44.300 her that will always be beyond my grasp, and I open up to that, and she opens up to

00:30:48.680 that, and me, and we reciprocally open, and Aaron, that's how you fall in love with

00:30:52.700 something.

00:30:53.300 Yeah, yeah.

00:30:53.520 So I think, and from the first person perspective, it's yes, but I think Yadin and other people

00:30:59.500 have done work that when people have this sense of being called, and they have this

00:31:02.640 noetic experience of the really real, they do make their lives better by many objective

00:31:08.340 measures.

00:31:09.180 Their relationships get better.

00:31:10.260 Well, you mentioned healing.

00:31:11.720 Yeah.

00:31:11.920 So I've been wrestling about that physiologically.

00:31:14.660 Well, partly because I've been writing about the Gospels, and about a quarter to a third

00:31:20.160 of the Gospel account is miracles of healing, right, which is a difficult, that's difficult

00:31:25.400 ground to tread on if you're an empirical materialist, let's say, if you're a scientist.

00:31:31.000 Or at least a naturalist.

00:31:31.960 Exactly, exactly.

00:31:33.100 But there's another frame of interpretation, which doesn't necessarily exclude the miraculous,

00:31:38.560 but at least sidesteps it for the moment, possibly, or brings them together, to suggest

00:31:44.460 that, well, if the pattern of being that Christ represents is a divine ideal, there's

00:31:50.020 every reason to assume that it would be allied with the kind of healing that you were describing,

00:31:54.060 which, so imagine that you could embody a spirit, a set of practices, a set of perceptions

00:32:00.680 and emotions that would optimize your function in relationship to the transcendent.

00:32:05.960 There's every reason to assume that what would accompany that would be an optimization of

00:32:11.360 psychophysiological function.

00:32:13.500 Yeah.

00:32:14.280 That's no different than claiming that you're going to have a much higher risk for mortality

00:32:18.900 if you're depressed, which is well known, right?

00:32:21.460 So there are certainly, there are links between attitude and underlying thriving that are well

00:32:27.160 established.

00:32:27.700 And it's not unreasonable to point out that, like, the archetypal ideal would, that manifestation

00:32:35.400 of the archetypal ideal, or even contact with the archetypal ideal, would be something

00:32:40.000 that would tap you hard in a healing direction.

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00:33:49.980 I think so.

00:33:52.620 I mean, so one of the arguments I've been working on is, well, you know, I mean, you

00:34:00.320 know this better than I do.

00:34:01.660 I mean, one of Piaget's great insights, the thing that made him a brilliant scientist,

00:34:06.280 right, is he was looking for systematicity in the error being produced in the psychometric

00:34:10.800 measures of intelligence.

00:34:11.800 Just that move alone is brilliant.

00:34:14.000 Everybody else treats the errors as noise.

00:34:15.720 He says, well, what if there's patterns in the error?

00:34:18.260 And if the patterns, if there's systematicity that points to intrinsic constraints and developmental

00:34:22.600 arc and all that, and that alone is brilliant.

00:34:26.240 And then I've sort of been reflecting on that and connecting with some of the literature in

00:34:30.120 insight, which is to think, well, if there's systematicity of error, there's also the possibility

00:34:34.760 of systematicity of insight, which is not an insight into this particular problem, but

00:34:40.120 an insight into a family or network of problems such that, right, it would be, lead to a systematic

00:34:47.640 transformation of one's orientation and grip on the world.

00:34:50.980 And it would also be systemic.

00:34:52.400 It would tend to percolate through the entire psyche.

00:34:55.000 That's what a baptism is.

00:34:56.780 Well, I mean, it can be.

00:34:58.220 I mean.

00:34:58.720 Well, well, right, right.

00:35:01.180 That's the transformation that a baptism is designed to bring about if it's possible.

00:35:06.860 So, yeah, and I mean, I think the shamanic death and rebirth, I think the great doubt

00:35:12.320 in Zazen is doing it.

00:35:14.480 Yeah.

00:35:15.680 And, you know.

00:35:16.420 Well, that's what happened to Descartes, too.

00:35:19.040 How so?

00:35:19.620 How do you think?

00:35:20.040 Well, he decided that he was going to doubt everything, right?

00:35:22.800 And to take a journey down to what would you say the land of the fundamental presumption,

00:35:28.960 something like that.

00:35:29.620 And my sense with Descartes, I mean, his realization is often translated as I think, therefore I am.

00:35:36.100 But I don't really think that that's how he would have conceptualized it had he been alive now.

00:35:41.340 I think it's something more like, I'm conscious, therefore I am.

00:35:45.360 Or I can't doubt the fundamental reality of my own being.

00:35:49.120 Well, I'll put it back to you in the way I see it.

00:35:51.620 And let's see if we're...

00:35:52.900 So, before the scientific revolution in Descartes, we have a contact epistemology.

00:35:57.340 We have the epistemology that when you know something, the form of that, not the shape,

00:36:02.040 the form of it, the principle of intelligibility in it is identical in your mind and the thing.

00:36:08.040 They conform together.

00:36:09.440 So, this is a contact epistemology.

00:36:11.280 It's a mutual participation.

00:36:13.220 And then, of course, when we get this, because of Copernicus and Kepler, we get this separation

00:36:17.720 and the divorce.

00:36:18.400 I talk about this a lot in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.

00:36:20.680 And what Descartes does is he tries to find where there's still that contact and where

00:36:27.100 he finds it remaining is in self-consciousness.

00:36:31.540 The mind's contact with itself is where that knowing by being is still to be found.

00:36:36.740 And he withdraws.

00:36:38.420 The problem we have faced since that is you can't get contact with the world from that

00:36:44.080 contact of the mind with itself.

00:36:45.780 And so, this is what a lot of the work I'm engaged in is about trying to overcome.

00:36:52.060 What's interesting is that Descartes, unbeknownst to a lot of people, of course, Descartes puts

00:36:56.780 a lot of emphasis on logic.

00:36:59.620 But Descartes also puts quite a bit of emphasis on insight.

00:37:02.500 That moment of insight when you get the flash and so all of the premises of the argument hang

00:37:07.740 together, that's crucial.

00:37:10.120 Do you, well, okay, I want to go a couple of directions from all that.

00:37:14.540 I've been thinking about thought itself as a form of secularized prayer.

00:37:21.780 Okay, so let me lay out what I've been thinking and tell me what you've been thinking and what

00:37:27.880 you think about this.

00:37:28.640 So, the first issue is this, is that we say we think things up, but we have no idea what

00:37:37.160 that means.

00:37:37.860 Because the phenomenology, this is something, by the way, that Carl Jung caught me onto to

00:37:42.780 some degree.

00:37:43.300 He said that we come across our own thoughts like we come across the furniture in a room.

00:37:49.060 It's like they're laid out before us.

00:37:50.580 And so, and that always struck me because being struck by a thought or having a thought

00:37:57.720 appear in your internal landscape is, well, I think it's a revelation.

00:38:03.040 I don't think it's any different than a revelation.

00:38:04.560 So, here's the steps, as far as I can tell, of thought.

00:38:09.280 The first step is something like a confession.

00:38:14.020 And the confession is, whatever I think about this is insufficient, which is equivalent in

00:38:19.480 part to thinking I'm insufficient, right?

00:38:21.360 So, it's a humble step.

00:38:22.740 I have to not know something.

00:38:24.600 And that not knowing has to be of motivational significance.

00:38:27.920 And then that has to be allied with wanting to know, okay?

00:38:32.160 And that has to be allied with faith that knowing would be better than ignorance.

00:38:36.260 And that's a presumption, man, especially because lots of times when you get a revelatory

00:38:41.320 thought, you're going to pay a price for your knowledge, which might be the catastrophic

00:38:45.120 dissolution of some of your previous assumptions, right?

00:38:48.380 So, you have to have this axiomatic presumption that more knowledge is good in the ways that

00:38:55.420 would be desirable to you and even more generally.

00:38:57.940 And I think that's something like faith in the essential goodness of being and its intelligibility

00:39:02.700 itself.

00:39:03.360 And I think that's partly why the scientific endeavor is embedded in that assumption of

00:39:08.540 the goodness of being and the goodness of knowledge.

00:39:11.000 Anyways.

00:39:11.600 No, I agree with that.

00:39:12.500 Okay, okay, okay.

00:39:13.500 So, with regards to...

00:39:15.520 I want to talk to you about that at some point.

00:39:17.040 Okay, we'll get back to that.

00:39:19.820 So, with regard to revelation.

00:39:21.180 So, the first is admission of insufficiency.

00:39:23.540 Yes.

00:39:23.880 And then there's the positing of a question.

00:39:26.200 And that seems to me to be allied with this gospel insistence that if you knock, the door

00:39:31.180 will open, and if you ask, you'll receive, and if you seek, you'll find.

00:39:35.600 That all depends on actually asking, actually wanting to know, actually seeking.

00:39:41.040 It can't be a game.

00:39:42.200 You've got to want to know.

00:39:43.760 You know, one of the things I've noticed in my own life is, for example, if I'm having

00:39:47.020 a problem communicating with my wife, or I'm having a scrap with a family member, and there's

00:39:51.420 a certain amount of pain in it, that if I sit down and I say, probably I'm contributing

00:39:58.180 to something to this.

00:40:00.260 I'd like to know what it is, which is not a fun thing to do.

00:40:03.640 No, but you'll get an answer.

00:40:05.360 Okay, so that's the next step.

00:40:06.720 So, you've got your humble confession.

00:40:09.060 Then you've got your revelation, which is the appearance of a solution to that.

00:40:14.360 Now, people say when they describe that, that they thought that up, but to me, that's an

00:40:19.360 empty explanatory framework because, yeah, if you couldn't think it up, why didn't you

00:40:24.720 know it to begin with?

00:40:25.780 And what exactly did you do to think it up?

00:40:28.660 And the answer is, well, I asked a question and a thought arose.

00:40:31.480 It's something like that.

00:40:32.640 And you can infer all sorts of unconscious mechanisms, but phenomenologically, the revelation

00:40:37.800 appears and it strikes you, you know?

00:40:40.320 But that's not enough.

00:40:41.600 That's not enough because you still then have the problem of potentially delusional or self-deceptive

00:40:49.080 revelations.

00:40:49.820 But then there's an insistence, a Judeo-Christian insistence in the case that I'm referring to,

00:40:56.680 that you have to test the spirits to see if they're of God.

00:40:59.920 So, you have your confession and your openness to revelation.

00:41:03.300 You have the receipt of the revelation, but then the next step is, well, you better put that

00:41:09.800 thought to the test and, you know, attack it from this side, attack it from this side,

00:41:14.800 test it out and see if it's got solidity and weight and to understand its implications.

00:41:20.020 And it seems to me that, well, first of all, it seems to me that that's a variation of

00:41:25.500 the practice of, it's a secularization of the practice of prayer.

00:41:29.940 That's how it looks.

00:41:30.900 I mean, that makes sense historically as well.

00:41:32.860 But, okay, so what do you, what do you think about that?

00:41:35.380 Well, first of all, I mean, notice that you were provoked in my mentioning of insight and

00:41:40.280 the possibility of systemic insight.

00:41:42.300 Yeah, because a deep revelation would be a systemic insight.

00:41:45.540 I think so.

00:41:46.100 So, and there's a lot of work here.

00:41:51.440 Part of what I'm doing on sabbatical is also going through all the most last five years

00:41:55.300 of the insight literature, trying to keep abreast of that.

00:41:59.580 But, yeah.

00:42:03.520 So, interesting, both in the Neoplatonic tradition and the Zen tradition, you'll get, like I do a

00:42:09.860 practice every day where I'll say, who is asking the question?

00:42:13.640 Oh, yeah.

00:42:14.740 There's a good question.

00:42:15.840 Yeah, and then who's listening to the answer?

00:42:20.480 Okay, when you get an answer to that, do you get a vision?

00:42:24.120 No, no.

00:42:24.620 Are you asking about, like, a form of possession, so to speak?

00:42:27.940 Like, what set of motivations are positing this question and what set of motivations are

00:42:32.380 offering the answer?

00:42:33.420 No, see, that's the thing.

00:42:35.120 I mean, I could, if I was doing sort of a phenomenological analysis for scientific reasons,

00:42:40.140 and I do do that, but in this practice, what I'm trying to do is to get at aporia, to get

00:42:47.520 at genuinely not knowing, what Nicholas of Cusa called learned ignorance, which is what

00:42:52.580 Socrates started with.

00:42:53.660 He said, my wisdom consists in knowing what I do not know.

00:42:56.760 I call it an aporetic aperture.

00:42:59.500 What happens is you get a sense of, actually, I don't know who's listening.

00:43:05.960 What will happen is images will come up.

00:43:07.940 Yeah, that's what I was wondering.

00:43:09.600 Right, but then when you go, yes, and those are helpful images, but that is, I can just

00:43:15.080 as easily ask, what generated the image?

00:43:17.160 Yeah.

00:43:17.760 And what you get is, right, you get this falling away, and you get a very profound and frequently

00:43:24.320 disturbing sense of actually deeply not knowing.

00:43:29.380 But it's not a not knowing in the sense that you're disconnected from the depths, if I can

00:43:36.060 use that language.

00:43:37.340 It's a not knowing that precisely connects you deeper and deeper to the depths.

00:43:42.040 Okay, so do you think by doing that, that you're, are you attempting to circumvent what

00:43:47.540 might be regarded as narrowly self-serving biases in questioning and answering?

00:43:52.100 Yes, yes.

00:43:52.860 And you're doing that by attempting to establish a relationship with what's ineffable at the

00:43:57.880 base instead of stalling out, let's say, part way down?

00:44:01.900 Yes, but, but it's nothing I can have.

00:44:05.620 It's only something I can participate in.

00:44:07.880 It's only something I can be.

00:44:09.400 I can't have it, right?

00:44:11.300 I can't ever, it's like James's distinction between the I and the me, which you're familiar

00:44:15.680 with.

00:44:16.140 I can never have the I.

00:44:18.180 I can be I because I can only be aware of, I can only have the me.

00:44:21.860 It's the same kind of thing.

00:44:23.740 There's a no thingness to it.

00:44:25.320 But even saying no thingness sounds like you're putting a name on an entity.

00:44:29.300 What happens instead is a falling away of representational reification of any attempt

00:44:37.600 to reify things by representing them.

00:44:40.640 And what you get is you get, in a completely non-inflationary way, because I'm cognizant

00:44:48.140 of who I'm talking to, you get that nothing is excluded, but nothing is enclosed within

00:44:53.560 and without.

00:44:54.260 And there is no within and without.

00:44:55.440 You get to this, right?

00:44:57.260 So what's been the practical consequences of that practice for you?

00:45:00.440 The practical consequences of that is a abiding sense that becomes more and more capable of

00:45:11.680 intervening in my everyday consciousness and cognition of that epistemic and moral, at

00:45:18.260 least that's what I believe is happening, what people are telling me, humility.

00:45:22.280 Yeah, well, when I saw you today and started talking to you, I thought three things.

00:45:26.360 I thought you look more resigned, you look more hopeful, and you look more humble.

00:45:30.440 Well, thank you.

00:45:31.220 Yeah, well, I don't know what it is exactly.

00:45:34.260 Well...

00:45:34.700 Your expression, maybe, and your voice tone, like, I mean, it's not a dramatic shift from

00:45:40.460 the last time I saw you, but it's a shift in the direction that you just described.

00:45:44.900 And the resignation is interesting, because I think that's a sign of faith and a sign of

00:45:50.460 humility.

00:45:50.880 You know, and it's not...

00:45:52.180 People often think of resignation as pessimistic, but it doesn't, like...

00:45:57.380 I think of resolution.

00:45:58.520 I used to, because of the double senses of the word, of coming properly into view, like

00:46:03.380 when you resolve an image, but also I am resolved.

00:46:07.520 This, I am being called to this pilgrimage on walking the Philosophical Silk Road.

00:46:16.580 I, this is my pilgrimage to the God beyond God.

00:46:21.280 I am making myself as available as I possibly can.

00:46:24.920 To that.

00:46:25.520 To that.

00:46:26.400 So, okay, okay.

00:46:27.620 So, I mean...

00:46:28.260 Go ahead.

00:46:28.720 Go ahead.

00:46:29.060 Well, I mean, we mentioned baptism a little earlier, and I was writing about the descent

00:46:35.560 of the Holy Ghost in the Gospels.

00:46:37.840 So, that's when Christ's ministry starts.

00:46:41.080 So, it's an opening of the sort that you described.

00:46:45.220 It's an opening to possession by this ultimate ineffability, and there's a consequence of

00:46:51.240 that, and that's the descent of the Holy Spirit.

00:46:54.080 And so, that descent, we talked earlier about, and you helped me characterize too, in different

00:47:00.060 language, what that ineffable spirit, how it might make itself manifest.

00:47:04.600 I talked about the interplay between conscious and calling, and you talked about, you talked

00:47:10.400 about love, and you talked about the axiological, and there was one other dimension.

00:47:16.020 The soterological, the transformative, the human.

00:47:18.340 Okay, so imagine now you open yourself up to that.

00:47:21.200 Okay, so that's when Christ's ministry starts, but here's something very interesting and weird,

00:47:26.100 and I'm interested in your take on this.

00:47:29.520 As soon as the baptism ends, Christ goes into the desert.

00:47:33.240 Yes.

00:47:33.480 Okay, so now, what that indicates is a radical transformation of personality.

00:47:37.380 So, what was there before has, I wouldn't say, it's been supplanted, but that leaves a

00:47:45.700 desert emptiness.

00:47:46.900 That's a good way of thinking about it now.

00:47:48.360 So, Christ goes out into the desert.

00:47:49.840 It's like the Israelites leaving the Pharaohic.

00:47:51.360 The 40 nights, 40 days.

00:47:53.620 To tyranny.

00:47:54.140 Yeah.

00:47:54.560 Okay, so now he's in the desert, and that parallels the Israelite desert.

00:47:58.260 And then, he goes to the bottom of things.

00:48:00.940 So, you can imagine this is a colloquy with conscience.

00:48:04.200 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:48:06.280 So, imagine that you did something wrong, and you decided that you were going to delve

00:48:11.360 into the depths to understand exactly why it was that you set yourself up for that, and

00:48:15.420 that you were willing to go wherever the Spirit called you to delve into the understructure

00:48:20.960 of that error.

00:48:22.860 So, I think that's what happens.

00:48:25.320 I think that's what's being presented in the sequence of temptations that arises in

00:48:29.940 the desert.

00:48:30.580 So, imagine you go into the landscape of the soul, and then you go down the dependency hierarchy

00:48:35.980 to the point from which evil emerges.

00:48:39.180 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:48:40.860 It parallels the notion in Dante's Inferno, right?

00:48:43.920 Because Dante's Inferno was a set of concentric circles.

00:48:46.680 I'm reading the Inferno.

00:48:47.700 What's that?

00:48:48.340 I'm reading the Inferno.

00:48:49.000 Oh, yeah, okay, okay.

00:48:49.940 So, it's a journey.

00:48:51.220 So, my sense with the Inferno is you could take any given proximal and trivial sin and

00:48:57.840 delve into it and end up at the bottom.

00:48:59.920 And what Dante presents is that the meta-sin, the sin upon which all others emerges, is something

00:49:07.520 like betrayal, right?

00:49:09.780 Because it violates trust.

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00:50:25.100 Yeah, I mean, for me, it's betrayal, but of the ultimate that is also idolatry, because

00:50:39.320 all of the sins are versions of idolatry, about loving something in place of loving God.

00:50:47.140 Right.

00:50:47.540 Right?

00:50:47.800 That's a Tower of Babel problem, too.

00:50:49.580 Yes, yes, right.

00:50:50.560 And so, and this is Tillich's notion.

00:50:53.040 Tillich's notion is, what we're trying to do is, we're trying to bring an ultimate concern

00:51:00.980 and have it properly conform to what is most ultimate.

00:51:05.400 And this is the quest for the God beyond the God of theism.

00:51:08.800 But I see that tunneling down.

00:51:10.580 I mean, that, I do other practices.

00:51:13.640 I do a spiritual alchemy practice in which you try to recall moments of profound hurt

00:51:20.500 and humiliation.

00:51:22.060 Because those are the moments where you get the falsification of the pretentious projections

00:51:26.880 that you make.

00:51:28.120 The pretensions to know and to control both within and without.

00:51:32.000 And in those moments of hurt and humiliation.

00:51:34.300 So indicate profound indications of error and presumption.

00:51:37.060 Yes, yes, exactly, exactly.

00:51:38.800 So they remove the, they give you, now, what you try to do is you try to bring agape to

00:51:43.980 bear on them, neither pride nor guilt, so that you can, you can, you can turn away from

00:51:50.020 the super salience of the pain and get the revelation.

00:51:53.260 And the humiliation.

00:51:53.900 Right.

00:51:54.240 And get the revelation, though, of, but look, there's an aperture of her.

00:51:57.880 There's a glimpse of how things are outside of the pretence and the presumption.

00:52:02.400 And then what you're trying to do is smelt that and bring it in.

00:52:04.980 See, I think that's the same thing as the father who's trapped in the belly of the beast.

00:52:09.200 Oh, I think so.

00:52:10.440 And this happens to Jonah, you know, when Jonah descends into the depths.

00:52:15.080 And the consequence of that is his radical revaluation of his ethical stance and his reemergence

00:52:21.700 as a prophet.

00:52:22.760 Right.

00:52:23.000 But he goes all the way down to the bottom of things.

00:52:25.040 He does that, interestingly enough, because he tries to escape both his calling and his

00:52:29.840 conscience.

00:52:30.300 Yes.

00:52:30.780 Right.

00:52:31.320 Because God, well, God tells him to do something stupidly impossible and dangerous.

00:52:35.220 And he basically says, yeah, I don't think so.

00:52:37.720 I've always been fascinated by that story.

00:52:39.760 Of course, Melville makes a lot of it in Moby Dick.

00:52:42.640 There's a moment in that story that I find particularly compelling.

00:52:46.400 And one of the things I like about the Bible is it'll have these little moments of very powerful

00:52:53.100 humanity in the midst of resting with the numinous.

00:52:55.640 If you remember the story, they come to Jonah, the sailors, and say, what's going on?

00:53:00.560 And he says, well, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, and God's punishing me.

00:53:03.400 And they don't immediately throw him overboard.

00:53:04.900 Right, right, right.

00:53:05.340 They go back and they try to save his life.

00:53:07.420 They try to save him.

00:53:08.360 Yeah.

00:53:08.800 Yeah.

00:53:09.080 And I thought, what's going on there?

00:53:11.800 That's such a powerful moment.

00:53:14.640 And for me...

00:53:15.580 Right.

00:53:15.820 They only throw him overboard when there's nothing left to do.

00:53:18.000 They try everything they can.

00:53:19.240 Yeah.

00:53:19.560 They exhaust their human capacity in the pursuit of this stranger.

00:53:23.780 Yeah.

00:53:24.000 And it's...

00:53:25.500 Guilty stranger.

00:53:26.500 Yes.

00:53:26.660 By his own admission.

00:53:27.760 Right.

00:53:28.080 And it would be so easy to be self-righteous.

00:53:30.640 Yeah.

00:53:30.960 And fun.

00:53:32.360 Yeah.

00:53:32.780 And throw him overboard and witness the miracle.

00:53:35.360 And they put all of that aside for this.

00:53:38.000 And it's often, for me, I mean, I am often, like everyone else, I mean, especially coming

00:53:45.680 through the Christmas season, I am impressed by the impressive moments of the Bible.

00:53:51.580 But even that, I mean, you think about Elijah right after he has the, you know, he defeats

00:53:57.480 the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel and the fire from heaven and all, and then he flees

00:54:02.040 into the desert.

00:54:03.260 And then God, you know, says, come, I'm going to show you something.

00:54:06.840 And there's the big fire, and God's not in the fire, and the big wind, and God's not

00:54:10.740 in the earth.

00:54:11.360 That's conscience there, right?

00:54:13.360 Right.

00:54:14.020 The still, small voice within...

00:54:15.780 Or, or it's sometimes even...

00:54:17.340 It's also can be translated as a sheer silence.

00:54:20.140 It's like, it can be translated that way, also in the Hebrew.

00:54:25.040 And so it's, it's almost like what we were talking about before, that, that, I love this

00:54:30.360 idea of the sheer silence, because it's the ineffable, but not as negativity, but as superlative,

00:54:35.280 as that which is calling you.

00:54:37.000 Because what does he do?

00:54:38.360 He covers his face, right?

00:54:41.540 He looks, he beholds...

00:54:42.920 Do you think there's any difference between the valid voice of conscience and the voice

00:54:47.580 of the ineffable?

00:54:48.500 I mean, you can, if the ineffable is the foundation, and if conscience is a sign of transgression

00:54:55.680 against it, then those things should be related.

00:54:57.980 Well, see, here's the problem, and this is a problem that goes back, that I have with

00:55:02.000 Descartes.

00:55:03.040 Descartes, I mean, and this is a standard philosophical trope, so I'm not claiming any originality here,

00:55:08.480 but Descartes seems to get bunged up on the difference between a psychological and logical

00:55:14.200 indubitability, right?

00:55:16.820 But he gets the things that he can't doubt, and he then concludes that they're ontologically

00:55:22.000 certain.

00:55:23.080 And of course, our inability to doubt can be driven by many things other than metaphysical

00:55:27.900 necessity.

00:55:28.640 They can be driven by all kinds of psychological issues, self-deception issues.

00:55:32.860 Famous of various sorts.

00:55:34.080 Yeah, yes.

00:55:34.760 And so, and of course, everybody made a continual philosophical hay out of that.

00:55:41.140 And I worry also, because this comes up in Plato's Privet problem about what actually

00:55:48.320 turns people towards the good because of the problem of Alcibiades.

00:55:52.520 And I don't trust any, maybe, let me try a different word.

00:55:59.880 I don't idolize any one of my faculties.

00:56:02.940 I think my conscience can also be something that was driven into me, perhaps by aspects

00:56:09.260 of my culture, my parents.

00:56:11.040 That's the pathological superego problem.

00:56:13.200 And I suffer from a sadistic superego in a lot of ways.

00:56:16.340 And so...

00:56:16.940 See, in Pinocchio, the puppet has to establish a relationship with the conscience, and it transforms

00:56:23.640 as well.

00:56:24.580 Yes.

00:56:24.880 Right, so it's not an unerring divine voice from the outset.

00:56:29.140 It's something like a generic approximation that can err, and a tyrannical great father

00:56:37.280 within would be an example of that.

00:56:39.560 Right, and I think part of the Socratic project and how it's unfolded for me, often in a psychologically

00:56:44.560 startling way, is to try and enter into a dialogical relationship with my conscience, with

00:56:51.260 my consciousness, with my character.

00:56:53.460 And that, for me, is one of the great benefits of the Socratic way of life.

00:56:59.240 When they came to Antisthenes...

00:57:00.580 Is that part of testing the spirits?

00:57:02.500 I think so.

00:57:03.380 I mean, so Socrates had a demonium.

00:57:07.060 Yeah.

00:57:07.300 Right, he had his divine sign.

00:57:10.080 And he said he always listened to, right?

00:57:12.740 Right.

00:57:13.100 He relied on that in his trial, in the apology, and said that that was the thing that made him

00:57:17.760 different than other men.

00:57:18.600 Now, what's interesting, and many people have said this about it, especially in what's called

00:57:23.320 third-way scholarship, platonic scholarship, Socrates both trusts it and always comes up

00:57:28.420 with an argument around it.

00:57:30.340 He never does one or the other.

00:57:32.580 And while we see them as oppositional, he somehow saw them as deeply...

00:57:37.220 Dialogical?

00:57:37.920 Yeah, dialogical and convergent.

00:57:39.660 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:57:40.760 And see, when I was...

00:57:42.640 When I'd been in this journey, and I was in the midst of doing IFS, I had a very powerful...

00:57:48.460 I talk about this in my After Socrates experience.

00:57:50.700 I had a...

00:57:52.920 I don't know how familiar you are with IFS, internal family systems, where you do parts

00:57:58.420 work.

00:57:58.700 So, what's going on right now is this huge convergence within the psychotherapeutic domain

00:58:07.300 of dialogical models, of the self-dialogical practices.

00:58:12.080 And I was in the middle of doing parts work, and I was working with a part...

00:58:16.700 What would that mean practically?

00:58:18.740 What were you doing exactly?

00:58:20.140 So, what happens is, when you notice that you're sort of possessed by something, you try

00:58:26.180 and step back from...

00:58:27.020 Like your mother, your father, some ancestral spirit fragment.

00:58:30.620 Yeah.

00:58:31.160 And you try and step back into, well, Schwartz calls it the seat of the self, but I don't

00:58:40.760 think that's quite right.

00:58:41.620 But what you try is, you try and step back into that more sage-like awareness.

00:58:46.440 Right, right.

00:58:46.940 So, you're going deeper or higher.

00:58:48.720 Yeah.

00:58:49.100 Yeah.

00:58:49.520 And then what you do is, you try to...

00:58:51.640 And you don't demonize this part.

00:58:53.680 You try and enter into a dialogue.

00:58:54.840 You realize that it is guarding something.

00:58:57.060 This is...

00:58:57.920 It has some adaptive functionality.

00:59:01.280 Now, this is my take, not necessarily his, but I think what you do is you bring sort of

00:59:06.520 a mirror of agency or self-reflectiveness to this part.

00:59:11.100 You act like a mindfulness mirror to it.

00:59:12.860 You dialogue and you get it.

00:59:14.080 You get to say, well, oh, well, what...

00:59:16.340 You try and get it to explicate its normativity.

00:59:18.240 Sure.

00:59:18.620 Sure.

00:59:18.820 You tell what's actually governing and guiding it.

00:59:20.780 And then you get to...

00:59:21.480 And then you get...

00:59:22.400 You can help it develop that way.

00:59:23.600 Yes.

00:59:24.000 And you call it...

00:59:24.860 And then you become Socratic with it.

00:59:26.420 You call it to...

00:59:27.280 But how much part are you following the normativity that you're enforcing on me?

00:59:32.760 Yeah.

00:59:33.260 And what will happen frequently is it will relax and open...

00:59:36.880 Right, because it's being listened to.

00:59:38.160 It's being listened to.

00:59:39.060 Yeah.

00:59:39.160 And it's also realized that there's an opportunity here for growth.

00:59:42.500 Yeah.

00:59:42.860 Of course, this overlaps with a lot of...

00:59:44.140 So, Jung recommended naming those things.

00:59:46.460 Oh, you do.

00:59:46.960 You name them.

00:59:47.420 You name them.

00:59:48.080 Yeah.

00:59:48.260 But something happened, and you'll probably see a very Jungian thing in this.

00:59:52.140 And like I said, this is difficult for me to talk about, but I did talk about it already

00:59:55.660 publicly in After Socrates, and I trust...

00:59:58.140 Hell of a thing for an introvert to do.

00:59:59.900 Yes.

01:00:00.860 So, I was in the middle of one of these sessions, and an archetypal presence came in and pushed

01:00:09.800 aside all the parts and said, no, you're going to listen to me.

01:00:14.340 And it's...

01:00:15.060 Who are you?

01:00:16.600 And I said, I'm Hermes.

01:00:18.540 Oh, yeah.

01:00:19.420 The god of interpretation.

01:00:20.920 The god of meaning making.

01:00:21.940 This is what...

01:00:22.240 Did he have little winged slippers on in a little bit?

01:00:23.840 Well, no.

01:00:24.260 He was...

01:00:24.840 It was he...

01:00:25.840 Messenger of...

01:00:26.540 Winged messenger of the gods.

01:00:28.000 Yeah.

01:00:28.460 He appeared...

01:00:29.700 He very much had a presence of, like, of a psychopomp.

01:00:33.180 Mm-hmm.

01:00:34.860 And...

01:00:35.460 And when you mean it, when you say appeared, what was the phenomenology?

01:00:39.360 What was happening?

01:00:39.920 The phenomenology is, like, the phenomenology of the presence of a mind.

01:00:44.900 Like, I have a sense of...

01:00:46.420 I have a mind sight into your awareness.

01:00:49.600 Now, what's interesting about these things, and this is, again, my take, not the IFS people,

01:00:56.180 although I've talked to Mark Lewis at length about this, and he thinks it's a good take.

01:01:00.360 Like, I think of these entities as neither subjective nor objective.

01:01:06.000 I think of them transjective.

01:01:07.340 And I think Lewis is in the domain of relevance.

01:01:09.380 And relevance is neither objective nor subjective, but what binds them together.

01:01:13.120 Yeah.

01:01:13.660 He's binding the inner and the outer, the upper and the lower, and all of that together.

01:01:18.940 And so, it's the sense of a presence, but it's like what Charles Stang talks about, the divine double.

01:01:24.500 It's both you and not you.

01:01:26.380 Kind of like the way conscience is, but it has a...

01:01:29.360 Right.

01:01:30.680 I mean, and so I have an ongoing dialogue with Hermes.

01:01:33.580 It's very much...

01:01:35.560 Is this a presence that you visualize?

01:01:38.580 How do you know of its appearance?

01:01:40.340 I've had only one sort of vision.

01:01:43.260 What was the vision like?

01:01:44.360 The vision was very much...

01:01:45.400 Well, I've had...

01:01:46.820 The vision was very much what I later...

01:01:49.820 Very much like sort of Micah L., the archangel.

01:01:53.760 Oh.

01:01:53.920 Which is very interesting.

01:01:55.540 And then I've had one of sort of Thoth from Egypt,

01:01:59.440 and Hanuman from the Vedic tradition,

01:02:03.260 as well as Hermes from the Greek tradition.

01:02:07.060 And in the ancient literature, they're often seen as corresponding to each other in some fashion.

01:02:13.540 You understand, I'm treading on this very...

01:02:16.640 Okay, so what was the consequence of the appearance of this superordinate spirit,

01:02:22.540 arguably superordinate spirit, in the presence of this domain of chaos?

01:02:26.560 Well, one, I mean, it made it very clear to me that it...

01:02:31.960 I don't want to say it anymore.

01:02:33.460 He wanted to make it very clear that there was a dialogical relationship that needed to be developed and cultivated.

01:02:42.860 And it would be a relationship by which I would cultivate something analogous to Socrates' demonium.

01:02:52.480 That was the promise that was given to me.

01:02:54.220 Oh, oh, that's a good deal.

01:02:56.220 I think so.

01:02:57.960 Well, it's dangerous, but so is everything else.

01:03:02.140 Yeah, excellent things are rare, or we wouldn't pursue them, as Spinoza said.

01:03:06.020 Or we would all pursue them, as Spinoza said.

01:03:08.140 So I found Raf's work on ally work, and I've talked to a bunch of people that have, you know, the kind of practices you can do to enter into this.

01:03:19.180 Anderson Todd, a friend of mine, very helpful around this.

01:03:22.640 And so what became very apparent was that this demonium and the way I've internalized Socrates as a sage were very allied to each other.

01:03:41.180 Because Socrates also portrayed himself as being metaxu, being between the human and the divine.

01:03:47.640 And then to get to the deep answer to this, this all started to psycho-dynamically integrate with the intellectual philosophical realization of the Platonic proposal.

01:04:03.640 That human beings are supposed to always hold in tonos, creative tension, Nicholas of Cusa, Heraclitus, our finitude and our transcendence.

01:04:14.540 If we only hold on to our finitude, we fall prey to servitude and despair.

01:04:19.220 If we only hold on to our transcendence, we fall prey to hubris and inflation.

01:04:23.400 But if we can hold the two together, if we are the metaxu between the beast and the god, right, we can properly realize our humanity.

01:04:34.260 And this is what Socrates sees himself.

01:04:36.720 This is how he portrays Eros.

01:04:38.300 This is how he portrays the task of philosophy.

01:04:40.680 And so for me, that Socratic spirit and Hermes as a psychological-dialogical presence have become integrated together.

01:04:53.240 So that's the answer.

01:04:54.780 Well, that's quite a trip.

01:04:57.480 Well, I mean...

01:05:01.800 That's very much like, it's very much the conscious equivalent of a dream.

01:05:07.440 It's like a dream, but what's intriguing is the Platonic, Socratic possibility of it being filled as much with logos as it is with mythos.

01:05:18.840 That there is also as much...

01:05:21.140 Because when I dialogue, I write out dialogues with Hermes, it's very much...

01:05:26.440 At times, it's very much like encountering an archetypal figure.

01:05:30.240 Have you read the Red Book?

01:05:32.380 I've read parts of it.

01:05:33.300 Because it's what you're talking about is quite reminiscent of the sorts of exercises that Jung undertook.

01:05:39.700 Well, what you find out is this is also deeply reminiscent of a lot of the theurgic practices that were going on in the Neoplatonic tradition, as I've come to discover.

01:05:48.120 And that get taken up into Eastern Orthodox Christianity by Dionysus.

01:05:52.880 And Gregory Shaw has done some excellent scholarship showing that.

01:05:57.620 So let...

01:05:58.460 Okay, let me...

01:05:59.300 But I just want to make clear that there is a lot of rationality in this discourse, where I don't mean sort of Cartesian logicality.

01:06:07.000 I mean the calling to the full person recognition and responsibility towards the ongoing proclivity to self-deception.

01:06:16.460 And trying to comprehensively address it and seek systematic insight.

01:06:22.020 It's a deep hole.

01:06:22.680 It's a deep hole.

01:06:23.480 And it's not...

01:06:26.400 There's something mysterious about it in Marcel's sense.

01:06:29.380 If you ever think you've got a full phenomenological grasp on the engine of self-deception within you, you, of course, have fallen prey to one of the deepest forms of self-deception.

01:06:40.300 So whenever you think you frame it, you have to not idolize...

01:06:43.360 This is Tillich again.

01:06:44.220 You have to not idolize that frame.

01:06:46.220 You have to constantly...

01:06:47.160 It has to be constantly open to self-correction.

01:06:50.180 Yeah, well, the opposite of self-deception is probably something like the constant openness to self-correction, rather than a stance per se.

01:06:59.280 I was deceived, now I have the truth.

01:07:01.300 It's like, no, there's a process by which you continually discover the truth.

01:07:05.740 And allegiance to that is the opposite of self-deception.

01:07:08.240 So that's what I would call my faith.

01:07:11.020 My faith is a faithfulness to a process of self-correction, not to any one faculty as the voice of the divine.

01:07:17.720 I think the capacity for the self-correction to take on a life of its own and a life on its own that plugs into transpersonal and transjective aspects of my being, for me, that is better.

01:07:31.640 I'm very impressed that you managed to bring all of that back to the point where it started, by the way.

01:07:36.040 So I would say, in relationship to that, first of all, that I agree that that, in fact, the eye that's at the top of the pyramid, let's say the eye of Horus that's at the pinnacle of the pyramid, is a representation, as far as I'm concerned, of the aware attention that allows for continual self-correction.

01:07:53.960 And part of the implication of the ancient Egyptian theology is that nothing should be put higher up in the pyramid of value than the thing that's gold at the top that's associated with the open eye.

01:08:11.340 That's right, watch and attend.

01:08:13.180 And in that spirit of, you said guilt-free, there was two criteria you had, free of guilt and free of pride.

01:08:21.700 Pride, yes. Just apprehension of what's there in front of your, this is, Christ says something like this too.

01:08:28.340 This is in the Gospel of Thomas, though, he says, the kingdom of God is spread upon the earth, but men either do not or will not see it.

01:08:34.920 The will not being the more interesting one, as far as I'm concerned.

01:08:37.780 And part of that organization of the psychological hierarchy to put the eye, not the letter eye, but the eye on top is to prioritize that neutral isn't exactly right.

01:08:51.020 It's an attention that's oriented towards the highest ineffable good, to put that above everything else.

01:08:56.800 Now, I would say that I wasn't trying to reduce that to conscience and calling.

01:09:02.440 I didn't think you were.

01:09:03.260 Okay, okay. I was thinking about those as, what would you call, they're part of the dynamic process of attention that allows the attention per se to rise to the top.

01:09:13.680 So, because I could pay attention, careful attention, to how it is that I'm calling myself out, let's say, in a Socratic manner.

01:09:22.240 Because you also are granted the right to the presumption of innocence, right?

01:09:28.740 So, even if you're accusing yourself, it's perfectly reasonable to set up a defense, but there's a starting point with the prodding of conscience.

01:09:36.620 If conscience prods you, two questions come up.

01:09:38.760 One is, I'm falling prey to an internal tyranny, and the other is, I'm wrong.

01:09:43.360 Well, you need to figure out which of those two is right.

01:09:46.680 You can do that dialogically.

01:09:48.040 You can do that in conversation with someone as well.

01:09:50.940 And calling is the same thing, I would say, is that a calling can emerge as a consequence of your possession by a particular ideological spirit,

01:09:59.000 or it can be a manifestation of the real thing.

01:10:02.000 And, like, it's up to you to tread very carefully to make sure you get those right, and then the dynamic interplay of those two things is even more reliable,

01:10:09.820 probably, especially if you share it with other people.

01:10:13.040 There's a, I've been thinking about the Exodus story of the burning bush in terms of calling,

01:10:17.980 and I think it maps very nicely onto our discussion of depth, because, and you tell me what you think about this.

01:10:24.000 So, when Moses encounters the burning bush, things are actually not going so bad for him.

01:10:29.740 Now, he's escaped from Egypt, so he's freed himself from tyranny, and now he's got himself two young wives,

01:10:35.160 and he's doing pretty well with his father-in-law, who he gets along with, and he's a shepherd,

01:10:39.200 and so it's not like he's no longer an Egyptian aristocrat, but, you know, all things considered,

01:10:44.920 he has a perfectly stable and productive ordinary life.

01:10:48.040 Now he's wandering around, and it's near Mount Sinai, by the way,

01:10:51.240 which is the place where the divine and the proximal meet.

01:10:54.000 And this thing glimmers and catches his attention.

01:10:57.100 It's like a manifestation of Hermes.

01:10:59.320 And so he decides to step off the beaten track as a consequence of this calling and invitation.

01:11:05.720 And he moves closer and closer to this manifestation of the sublime.

01:11:09.960 And as he moves closer, he starts to understand that he's on sacred ground.

01:11:14.140 And I don't think there's anything different than that,

01:11:16.700 than noting what it is that calls to you, and then pursuing it,

01:11:20.460 and going down into the depths as a consequence.

01:11:23.460 And eventually what happens to Moses, because he continues his pursuit,

01:11:27.880 is that the voice of being itself speaks to him,

01:11:31.340 and that's when he's also transformed into the kind of leader who can fight tyranny and slavery.

01:11:37.500 That's excellent.

01:11:39.160 That's why it's Moses and Elijah, by the way, I think,

01:11:41.700 that end up at the transfiguration, because you have Elijah as the...

01:11:46.200 Well, they're also both, they both encounter the fire of God.

01:11:49.540 They, they, they're both, they both, but, but they're interesting parallels,

01:11:52.880 because it's Elijah who's the first proponent of the notion that God is not an external phenomena

01:11:59.520 associated with the natural world, associated with Baal,

01:12:02.240 but this internal voice and its conscience for Elijah.

01:12:05.680 And then for Moses, the God that he encounters seems to be the God of calling.

01:12:09.720 And so, and they, they're like on, what would you say, one on each side of Christ,

01:12:14.140 which is, you know, a mind-boggling narrative representation.

01:12:18.980 There's a lot I want to talk to you, but let me try one thing,

01:12:21.320 because there isn't, there's, I want to circle back to the question of sacred and God,

01:12:26.360 and the God beyond God.

01:12:27.700 And so, one of the things that I find interesting in the fire, of course,

01:12:33.100 is that it burns, but it does not burn up.

01:12:36.480 Right.

01:12:37.760 And so, this goes towards a Neoplatonic model too.

01:12:43.600 And of course, Plato is, it's the sun, the image of the sun,

01:12:46.280 but it's the same thing, the fire that burns and is not burnt up,

01:12:49.060 at least in Greek mythology.

01:12:52.120 And Heraclitus said that the cosmos was that too.

01:12:54.900 Uh-huh.

01:12:56.080 What am I getting at?

01:12:56.980 I'm getting at this notion, and all those associations,

01:12:59.580 because I'm associating the long-standing association of fire and logos,

01:13:02.740 by the way, they're associating together.

01:13:05.420 So, the sacred also seems, we've been talking a lot about

01:13:08.860 the soterological and the axiological and the ultimate,

01:13:12.600 but I want to return to something that I think binds them together,

01:13:15.740 which is the Neoplatonic notion of the sacred as an inexhaustible fount

01:13:26.100 of intelligibility.

01:13:28.700 So...

01:13:29.100 The well that never runs dry.

01:13:30.640 The Tao, right, yes.

01:13:32.040 And the Tao, right?

01:13:32.720 Yes.

01:13:32.920 Absolutely.

01:13:33.240 And let me give you a concrete experience of that.

01:13:37.400 I'm going to assume, given what you've said, that this is the case for you in the Gospels.

01:13:42.960 I have a different relationship with the Bible.

01:13:46.040 We can perhaps talk about that.

01:13:47.580 But for me, the Republic does this for me.

01:13:49.900 Plato's Republic.

01:13:51.500 I will read the Republic, and it's inevitably transformative.

01:13:54.860 There's a reciprocal opening.

01:13:55.900 I see something in the text I haven't seen.

01:13:57.980 It opens me up.

01:13:58.820 I go into my life.

01:13:59.940 My life opens up.

01:14:01.580 I'm transformed.

01:14:02.700 I come back after a bit, and I read the text, and it opens itself up again to me.

01:14:07.340 And it's inexhaustible.

01:14:09.040 There's this inexhaustible fount.

01:14:11.420 And so, there's some sacredness in there.

01:14:13.560 I think this is, you know, this is the present, the opportunity to enter into a conformity with

01:14:21.540 the good, with the one.

01:14:22.580 And so, for me, there's a positive in this, in the experience of the sacred.

01:14:29.440 And the reason I want to do that is I want to complement, and I use that word exactly,

01:14:33.700 complement, you know, the call and the conscience with also this notion of being fed,

01:14:39.440 of being nourished.

01:14:41.140 I'm reading a book on Lectio Divina by, what's his name, The Ladder of the Monks.

01:14:48.000 And he talks about when you're reading the text, and you're actually being nourished by it.

01:14:51.460 And, of course, there's the manna from heaven, and all that sort of stuff.

01:14:54.980 And, of course, you can't grasp it, because if you try and grasp it and store it, you'll

01:14:58.940 lose it, and all that sort of Blakean stuff that's there.

01:15:02.180 And so, I want this idea also of a fount, an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility.

01:15:08.900 And if Neoplatonism is right, and I think philosophy, at least some philosophy, and a lot of philosophy

01:15:18.120 of physics, and of biology is pointing towards too, which is that there is a non-logical oneness

01:15:25.200 between intelligibility and being.

01:15:27.600 The way we get at what's most real is we trace out the asymmetric dependence relationships

01:15:33.240 of intelligibility.

01:15:34.940 That's based on a faith in Parmenides' proposal, that somehow thinking and being are one.

01:15:40.220 They're not identical, but they're one in some.

01:15:42.940 Because if they're fundamentally not conformable, we are bound into skepticism.

01:15:48.440 Something Richard Dawkins said, an adapted organism is by necessity a microcosm of its environment.

01:15:54.980 Yes, and Fristin has said this, we don't have models, we are models.

01:15:58.040 And I've made similar arguments based on the stunning work of Catherine Pickstock and others

01:16:04.140 for extended naturalism, but we can perhaps come back to that in a sec.

01:16:09.340 So, let me, because I've been thinking about this, and there's a concern for idolatry here,

01:16:15.180 and I think you're, in many ways, maybe the perfect person to talk to about this.

01:16:20.020 So, I'm going to say something, and then give me a moment around it.

01:16:22.860 I find Plato's Republic, and I find, let's say, my relationship to my beloved partner.

01:16:32.940 We've made a lifetime commitment to each other, right?

01:16:36.760 There's something sacred there, in that I continue, I've come to realize I will never

01:16:42.960 sound her depths completely, and, right?

01:16:46.420 And there's a way in which...

01:16:47.360 That's a good deal.

01:16:48.100 Yeah, it is a good deal, and I've made a lot of horrible mistakes to get there.

01:16:53.620 And I'm appreciative for those errors, and for the people that actually hurt me in some ways.

01:16:59.720 Because that hurting was a sensitivity that allowed me to see her.

01:17:03.820 First person I fell in love with their soul before I fell in love with their physical beauty.

01:17:08.180 That's a good order.

01:17:11.140 I'm not responsible for it, I just have it.

01:17:14.260 But...

01:17:14.940 You can be responsible for being grateful for it.

01:17:17.360 I am.

01:17:17.980 I am continually grateful.

01:17:19.020 Yeah, well, that's a good deal, too.

01:17:20.220 So, why am I bringing this up?

01:17:23.780 I think these things are properly sacred, but I don't think, while they are symbols in

01:17:31.100 the union to Lickian sense, they are not themselves the one.

01:17:35.260 They are not the ultimate.

01:17:36.140 And so, I'm going to talk about a practice I've adopted.

01:17:44.700 So, I'm not advocating for this as a metaphysical proposal.

01:17:47.840 But I've been using the term, the one, or God, for when we experience ultimacy as sacred.

01:17:56.760 Not just something pointing to the ultimate as sacred, but ultimacy itself.

01:18:01.140 So, that's a very restricted usage and careful.

01:18:06.740 It is.

01:18:07.200 It's careful because, again, the concern is the concern...

01:18:11.940 Defense against idolatry, too.

01:18:13.720 Idolatry, yes.

01:18:14.540 The concern is the concern for idolatry.

01:18:16.780 But there's also the Zen concern of ultimately not being bound to your representations, but realize

01:18:24.520 they have an ongoing asymmetric asymptoting towards reality.

01:18:32.440 And so, the Cohen is the commitment to, no matter what I'll do, my thought will have representation,

01:18:40.420 but I'm always trying to push towards that which is below representation.

01:18:45.600 All my work on relevance realization helps me because that's much lower than the level of representation.

01:18:51.180 Much more practical.

01:18:51.900 Right, right, right.

01:18:52.840 So, I wanted to put those two things together in a proposal...

01:18:56.500 So, that's meaning as the ultimate instinct.

01:18:59.000 Yeah, whereas if what we mean by meaning is religio.

01:19:01.780 If we mean to be connected to something that has a reality and a value beyond my existence.

01:19:08.420 That's that nourishing aspect.

01:19:10.200 That's the nourishing aspect.

01:19:11.120 But it's interesting because what happens is once we are, at least what seems to be happening for me and what I read in the text I'm reading,

01:19:21.400 is once we get a certain degree of nourishment, we are more and more capable of, because we're primate mammals,

01:19:28.620 of turning the arrow of relevance outward, agapically, right?

01:19:33.080 Not how are things relevant to me, but ultimately how I can be relevant to them.

01:19:37.660 The meaning in life literature.

01:19:39.040 This is how you find out if people have meaning in life.

01:19:41.340 What do you want to exist even if you don't?

01:19:44.060 And how much of a difference do you make to it now?

01:19:47.000 You have a good answer to both of those.

01:19:48.820 You've got meaning in life.

01:19:49.140 Say them again.

01:19:49.720 What do you want to exist even if you don't?

01:19:53.860 Yeah.

01:19:54.720 And how much of a difference do you make to it now?

01:19:57.240 Yeah.

01:19:58.820 And that's not...

01:20:00.500 Cut those down.

01:20:01.720 Yeah.

01:20:02.680 So, I think the only...

01:20:05.420 Do you have an answer to those?

01:20:06.920 Yes.

01:20:07.520 Would you share them?

01:20:08.480 So, for me, my religio to the sacred realization of ultimacy is that that gives me the answers.

01:20:24.980 And so, all of the projects that I'm engaged in that help people for themselves, not for me,

01:20:31.420 but for themselves, either individually and collectively, realize that, that gives me a sense of meaning in life.

01:20:37.660 And what are you doing about that, would you say?

01:20:41.400 Those are the proximal actions that are imbued with meaning by that transcendent goal.

01:20:46.080 Yes.

01:20:46.680 So, I mean, a big part of it is all the work I'm doing with and for the Verveke Foundation.

01:20:51.260 Yeah.

01:20:51.600 Yeah.

01:20:51.740 New series.

01:20:52.500 But also the academic work I'm doing.

01:20:54.720 All of my academic scientific work about intelligence and rationality.

01:21:00.300 I've just recently been integrated the relevance realization and the predictive processing framework

01:21:05.800 in a way that a lot of people are finding very valuable.

01:21:08.720 All of that has, I think it's fair to say, because other people are saying it to me,

01:21:13.360 it has scientific merit.

01:21:14.700 I'm happy about that.

01:21:15.500 But it's all oriented towards this, what I've appointed.

01:21:20.940 Because for me, it's not just the call away from self-deception, the call of conscience.

01:21:28.720 It's the calling to a fullness, which isn't a completion.

01:21:34.280 It's that sense of religio, that meaning in life, that so that I'm, and I feel that I

01:21:43.980 have experiences of what is ultimate as sacredness experiences, experiences of sacredness.

01:21:54.680 Things that are calling the whole of me to a commitment.

01:21:57.780 Right.

01:21:58.060 And that's the genuine answer to the problem of relevance realization and the meaning crisis.

01:22:03.700 Find out what's actually meaningful.

01:22:05.900 Let me offer you something.

01:22:08.060 Okay, so I talked to Sam Harris recently again, and one of the places that Sam and I find firm

01:22:16.920 mutual ground is in a concern, metaphysical concern with evil.

01:22:21.300 So Sam was really struck to the soul, I would say, by the reality of evil associated in his

01:22:28.320 case, particularly with what happened in Auschwitz and places like that.

01:22:31.960 So Sam is metaphysically convinced of the existence of evil.

01:22:35.280 And that's been an orienting point for him.

01:22:38.040 And part of the reason that he wanted to ground his ethical metaphysics in objective science

01:22:43.640 was because he didn't feel that there was a better way of demonstrating the reality of

01:22:49.440 good in relationship to evil, unless that grounding was possible.

01:22:54.920 Now, I've been thinking about that as I've been writing what I'm writing, but I took a different

01:23:00.680 attack, I would say, to some degree than Sam, even though maybe the net end goal is the

01:23:06.600 same as it was, by the way, for Piaget, because that was his project, right?

01:23:10.800 Right from the beginning.

01:23:12.400 So because Piaget wanted to reconcile materialism with metaphysics.

01:23:16.520 And so in any case, I've been thinking a fair bit about what's real in terms of meaning.

01:23:26.560 And people have very little doubt that pain is real.

01:23:34.760 They certainly act as if it's real.

01:23:36.840 It's very difficult not to act as if pain is real.

01:23:39.380 And one of the consequences of that realization is that you can, therefore, very rapidly claim

01:23:46.440 that whatever rectifies pain most effectively is even more real.

01:23:50.340 And then you might ask, what rectifies pain most effectively?

01:23:54.160 And so here's a couple of, here's something not to do.

01:23:57.580 Think about yourself a lot, your proximal, immediate demands and needs.

01:24:02.780 So you know that relationship between narrow self-consciousness and suffering is so high that

01:24:09.020 they load on the same factor, in fact, factor analytic studies of negative emotion.

01:24:13.760 So if you're self-conscious, that narrow self, you are miserable.

01:24:17.220 This is what I meant, just one small intervention and I'll let you go.

01:24:19.300 This is what I meant about, this is Plato's pivot problem.

01:24:22.040 How do you involve all of the psyche without becoming self-involved?

01:24:26.460 In that narrow pain, you know, self-inflicting suffering, loss of agency.

01:24:32.940 This is Plato's thing about how to, because we need to involve all of you.

01:24:36.620 This is Tulloch too.

01:24:37.480 That's his definition of spirit.

01:24:38.560 That which involves the whole of the psyche.

01:24:40.880 But how do you get all of that involved while resisting the magnetism of the ego?

01:24:45.900 Well, maybe it's also partly by realizing that it's not only all of the psyche.

01:24:50.060 It's all of the psyche embedded in the whole structure of being simultaneously, right?

01:24:54.160 Of course.

01:24:54.400 This is part of the reason that our current conceptualizations of mental health

01:24:58.320 suffer from such a paucity of content, of conceptualization.

01:25:04.080 Because we view mental health as something like harmony in the subjective world.

01:25:09.780 But that's like, you're talking about the mysteries of your relationship.

01:25:14.180 I mean, it's obvious from talking to you that part of the reason that you're as sane as you are,

01:25:19.160 and as happy as you are, is not because immediately because you're well constituted as a subjective creature,

01:25:26.100 but because you've established a harmony of existence in relationship at least to one other person.

01:25:31.580 You want that more broadly.

01:25:32.940 And that means that you have to be called to service for something that's certainly not localized to the narrowness of you now.

01:25:42.880 Yes.

01:25:43.640 Okay, because your phenomenological markers, subjective well-being, don't track meaning in life.

01:25:50.160 They come apart.

01:25:51.220 They can move opposite to each other.

01:25:55.600 Right.

01:25:55.920 This is what happens when you have...

01:25:57.220 This is what happens to Job.

01:25:58.220 Well, but it's also what happens if you have a child and you enter into committed...

01:26:02.360 Right, right.

01:26:02.620 All of your measures of subjective well-being collapse.

01:26:05.020 Right, right.

01:26:05.500 And if you ask people why they do it, and they're giving you a healthy answer,

01:26:08.460 not they fell into it or they're responsible, but they've chosen parenthood.

01:26:13.160 Yeah.

01:26:13.540 And they're going through what L.A. Paul calls a transformative experience,

01:26:17.300 something you can't understand until you go through it.

01:26:19.300 Yeah, yeah.

01:26:19.860 It's very much, right, this act of faithfulness, right?

01:26:24.680 But what happens is, why they do it is because they say it makes their lives more meaningful.

01:26:30.240 Right, right.

01:26:30.680 Because they're connected to something that has a reality beyond it.

01:26:34.660 Beyond the immediate.

01:26:35.460 Yes.

01:26:36.220 Beyond subjective self-report.

01:26:38.040 Right.

01:26:38.540 And it's an entity they want to exist even if they don't.

01:26:42.000 In fact, they're willing to sacrifice their life for it.

01:26:44.460 Right, right.

01:26:44.900 Right?

01:26:45.660 And, right, they feel that they make a difference to it.

01:26:49.420 This is the agapic concern.

01:26:50.660 Right, right.

01:26:51.220 Their love is person, not morally person, I mean cognitive person.

01:26:56.380 It's creative of, I mean, when you bring a child home, they're obviously a moral person.

01:27:01.120 I'm not talking moral.

01:27:02.100 But they're not a cognitive person.

01:27:03.920 And we get to partake in this miracle.

01:27:07.800 Like, we shine agape on them, which isn't eros, which isn't philia.

01:27:12.340 All right?

01:27:12.860 That's not your friend.

01:27:14.160 It's not something you want to be one with.

01:27:15.560 In fact, the project is the opposite.

01:27:16.900 You're trying to make it autonomous from you.

01:27:18.580 Right, right, right.

01:27:19.180 It's a major sacrifice.

01:27:21.240 Yes, it's agape.

01:27:22.340 And it's just an astonishing thing.

01:27:24.520 It's like magic.

01:27:26.240 So, one of the things I figured out by going through the book of Job is allied with what you just described.

01:27:32.060 So, there's a moral proposition in Job that has to do with the segregation between immediate subjective well-being, let's say, and long-term meaning.

01:27:41.120 So, Job's proposition is, so, things fall apart very badly for Job, right?

01:27:47.400 Yes.

01:27:47.780 And we know he's a good man because that's stated right at the beginning, right?

01:27:50.720 That's axiomatic, okay.

01:27:52.080 But his friends attribute blame to him.

01:27:55.860 And he basically says, well, yeah, I'm sinful, but no worse than the typical good man, and so you can't just dump all this at my feet.

01:28:05.900 I'm not going to take myself apart in the face of my misery and decimate my soul in addition to my suffering.

01:28:12.800 And then his wife says, well, shake your fist at God and die.

01:28:16.940 And Job says, well, I have some reason to do that given the tragedies that have befallen me, but at minimum, I'm going to suspend judgment.

01:28:25.300 And better than that, I'm going to retain my faith in the essential goodness of existence regardless of the proximal evidence.

01:28:32.620 And then there's a deeper consideration in Job, which is you're called upon to do that no matter what.

01:28:39.120 And that is definitely a place where measures of, say, subjective well-being and ultimate meaning are going to separate because the moral impetus in the book of Job is that you're called to maintain your allegiance with what is highest no matter what proximal price you currently might be paying.

01:28:56.520 And then you can even think about that practically, which I think is a useful thing to do.

01:29:00.320 If you're stricken with a terminal and painful disease, let's say, and maybe coincidentally a series of financial catastrophes, just to make it a little bit worse, and maybe your family's also dumping heaps of coal on your head, you have every reason to descend into a kind of nihilistic bitterness.

01:29:22.580 But then you might say, well, to what end?

01:29:25.420 Now you have your illness, you have your financial catastrophe, you have your moral culpability, and you have your bitter nihilism to contend with.

01:29:34.520 One thing you do have, if you're fortunate, and I would say also God willing, that it is in the face of multiple dimensions of simultaneous catastrophe, the refusal to take the path of nihilistic bitterness and to shake your fist at the world.

01:29:49.980 And that's not nothing.

01:29:52.040 You know, maybe that wouldn't be enough to rescue you from the dire states that you're in, but it might be enough to stop you from descending to the ultimate possible hell.

01:30:03.800 I really love talking with you.

01:30:05.880 I want to respond because I want to talk about my take on Job and how, when I finally got Job, was I was actually watching a Tom Hanks movie called Job vs. the Volcano, which is a very silly movie.

01:30:23.580 It's a farce.

01:30:24.500 But it's a guy who discovers he's only got a year to live, and he goes on the proverbial last great journey.

01:30:30.940 And, of course, it becomes a quest, and he doesn't realize it.

01:30:34.420 There's a scene where he's shipwrecked, and he's on a raft made of luggage, and there's a girl that he's taking care of, and she's unconscious, and he's giving her the last remaining water.

01:30:42.840 So he's starting to suffer from exposure.

01:30:47.820 And so he's, by all measures of objective well-being, he's at the worst.

01:30:52.480 He's literally lost.

01:30:53.820 He's adrift.

01:30:54.620 He's cast away.

01:30:55.580 Right, right.

01:30:56.000 He's suffering physically.

01:30:57.620 The one person he's with is unconscious, and he's caring for them, and they're not capable of reciprocating at all.

01:31:02.560 It's a very powerful image.

01:31:03.640 I don't know how this scene got in this movie.

01:31:05.420 I think the staff writers went on lunch break, and they gave the intern a moment to write a thing.

01:31:10.300 And then what happens is, and it's astonishing, well done, there's a moonrise, and it's the moon illusion, and the music swells, and he, oh, calm ocean.

01:31:19.660 And he struggles, and he rises to his feet, and he opens his arms, and he says, oh, God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life.

01:31:30.540 I had forgotten how, and he struggles, and it's not the right word, but he just spits it out, how big.

01:31:37.080 Thank you for my life.

01:31:38.260 None of his problems have been solved.

01:31:39.600 And what I took from that is, what happens at the end of Job, when God appears, and starts showing Job all these astonishing things.

01:31:50.000 Oh, yeah, that's good.

01:31:51.220 And he said, and God is...

01:31:52.700 Don't forget about the wonder of the world.

01:31:54.700 And also, the numinous.

01:31:56.400 Yeah.

01:31:56.720 The numinous, right?

01:31:58.060 Oh, that's interesting.

01:31:59.180 Right, and the numinous, and what the numinous says...

01:32:01.900 Even in its monstrous forms.

01:32:04.440 Yes, even in the monstrous...

01:32:05.480 Because they speak of transcendence.

01:32:07.320 And God is saying, I am that presence that goes to the very depth of the numinous, both the happy forms and the...

01:32:14.740 And this is supposed to be the thing that is the answer.

01:32:19.100 Right, right.

01:32:19.800 And Job does reattain his fortune in the aftermath of that encounter.

01:32:23.820 And what happens with Job is he gets gratitude for his life.

01:32:29.320 And they steal that.

01:32:30.620 Put it in my book.

01:32:32.520 I'll attribute you.

01:32:34.000 Well, thank you.

01:32:34.540 Now, what that speaks to me is that there are these three things.

01:32:39.660 And this, I think, has to do with the transcendentals, the true and the good and beautiful.

01:32:42.580 They're all convertible, but they're also not reducible.

01:32:46.320 They're not logically identical to each other.

01:32:48.980 And I think one, and these three, Leo Farrar and I talked about this in the article we wrote on wisdom.

01:32:54.440 One is kind of sensory motor mastery.

01:32:56.180 If you don't have sensory motor mastery over your environment, if you're not solving the Fristonian problems of relevance, realization, and anticipation, you're just bereft with anxiety.

01:33:06.660 Your life's going well.

01:33:07.800 Okay, so there's that.

01:33:09.380 But then there's the excellent work by Susan Wolfe and others.

01:33:13.080 And this really is something that our society is not well set up to reflect upon right now.

01:33:18.060 It's that meaning in life and morality, you can't reduce one to the other.

01:33:21.680 Okay, so she gives many examples of, well, you know, double dissociation means you can't make an identity claim, right?

01:33:33.540 Is it possible for somebody to leave a very highly moral existence and yet have a life that, it's not going to be absolutely lacking in meaning because that's impossible for human existence,

01:33:43.300 but a life that's not very meaningful by many measures.

01:33:47.860 And she says, yes, consider the very real possibility of somebody who is leading a very moral life but is very lonely.

01:33:57.860 Their lives, there's nothing that they're doing that's especially moral.

01:34:02.440 Maybe they're very honest.

01:34:04.220 Could happen to a good person in a totalitarian state.

01:34:07.060 Many things, yes.

01:34:08.600 And their lives could be very bereft.

01:34:10.660 Right, so there can be a dissociation.

01:34:12.360 And you can think of the other.

01:34:13.480 Can we think of people who maybe had very powerful meaning in life and yet were leading highly immoral existences?

01:34:20.460 Of course we can.

01:34:21.740 I mean...

01:34:22.520 They're thoroughly possessed, those people.

01:34:24.440 Yes.

01:34:24.940 So what you can see is just like subjective well-being and meaning in life come apart, morality and meaning.

01:34:30.340 And what that does...

01:34:32.020 Well, it shows you at least to some degree that morality isn't reducible to emotional state.

01:34:37.960 Well, it also shows that meaning in life can't be satisfied also just by being a highly moral person.

01:34:43.300 So that connectedness that we need, it has sort of three dimensions to it.

01:34:47.880 One is the dimension of sensory motor mastery.

01:34:50.980 One is the production, promotion, protection of personhood.

01:34:55.600 That's what I take morality to be.

01:34:57.880 And the other is the connection...

01:34:59.920 What do you mean?

01:35:00.940 I'm confused a bit about that.

01:35:02.700 There's part of me that's objecting in the background here.

01:35:05.180 Well, let's slow down and let's listen to that.

01:35:06.880 Okay, well, it's just that I'm not sure exactly what you mean by moral.

01:35:12.320 You know, let me give you an example, something that came to mind.

01:35:15.360 So Solzhenitsyn talks in the Gulag Archipelago, and I have to bring that up once per podcast,

01:35:20.660 by necessity, you know, about these intellectuals who are in a camp being worked to death.

01:35:27.140 And they had a seminar that they would conduct once a week, and they would all meet,

01:35:31.860 and they would talk about their specialty.

01:35:33.400 And they were men committed to their scientific endeavor who'd been imprisoned for ideological reasons.

01:35:42.860 And they took the opportunity to share what they loved.

01:35:46.100 And every week, one or more of them would disappear because they were dying.

01:35:51.240 Now, what they were engaged in was a moral endeavor.

01:35:57.480 You could say that the meaning of their life was pretty bitter at that point.

01:36:02.780 They were all starving to death or freezing to death or both,

01:36:05.980 being beaten at the low end of the totem pole in the Gulag hierarchy,

01:36:10.680 watching the people around them die.

01:36:13.460 But they were doing something profoundly ethical,

01:36:17.800 adhering to something they saw as a positive good, acting morally.

01:36:22.120 And there would be a meaning in that.

01:36:24.260 Like, the surround is pretty damn dismal, but...

01:36:27.220 But they're getting together and do the seminars.

01:36:29.340 The seminars aren't a moral endeavor.

01:36:31.800 The seminars are a meaning endeavor.

01:36:34.120 What do you love?

01:36:35.160 What are you connected to?

01:36:36.520 What do you want to exist even if you don't?

01:36:39.000 I don't know how to separate them,

01:36:44.080 the fact of the action oriented towards that good and morality per se.

01:36:48.780 I get your argument.

01:36:49.820 Look, I can certainly see the utility in dissociating emotional state,

01:36:54.800 especially proximal emotional state,

01:36:56.320 from meaning as such or purpose.

01:36:59.320 I mean, delay of gratification is that, fundamentally.

01:37:02.520 But I'm still struggling with that.

01:37:05.160 Oh, but perhaps.

01:37:06.900 Let me suggest something back.

01:37:08.300 So, I'm using morality the way I think Wolfe is using it,

01:37:15.220 the way that it's been used sort of post-Enlightenment, post-Kant,

01:37:18.820 which is your commitment to a sense of duty

01:37:21.920 born from something like the categorical imperative.

01:37:24.860 Okay, okay, okay, I see.

01:37:26.460 You're talking about, I think, a platonic notion of ethics.

01:37:31.180 Yes, yes.

01:37:31.700 Right, where you're talking about human flourishing.

01:37:33.940 Now, interestingly enough, Kant goes on to argue that if you do something out of love,

01:37:39.720 then it is expressly not a moral act.

01:37:42.120 Because if you're doing it for anything other than the sense of duty.

01:37:46.500 Right, well, he's hyper-conscientious.

01:37:48.660 Well, so do you think that that's the morality that Christ is pointing to in the Gospels,

01:37:52.300 where he states that unless your ethical striving exceeds that characterizing the Pharisees,

01:38:00.320 the hypocrites, the scribes, the academics, the lawyers, the legalistic types,

01:38:04.580 that it's not a true ethic at all,

01:38:06.380 and that the morality that you're describing that would be dissociable from meaning

01:38:10.280 is more the hypocritical or academic or legalistic type?

01:38:15.580 I think totally.

01:38:17.420 Okay, okay, okay.

01:38:18.340 Then that resolves the problem that I was having.

01:38:22.020 And I think Paul wrestles with this,

01:38:23.900 and I think there's ways I'm critical of it when he's talking about law and love.

01:38:27.860 The two different things.

01:38:29.600 And so, what I think happens in Job,

01:38:32.620 and what I think happens in Job versus the Volcano,

01:38:35.440 is Job, or Job, perhaps Job too,

01:38:39.920 Job recovers a gratitude for his life,

01:38:42.840 not because any of his moral, in this other sense,

01:38:47.300 there is no proof that the world is just.

01:38:50.640 Right.

01:38:51.380 All that's been happened is he has been opened to a connection,

01:38:56.280 a contact with what's numinous,

01:38:58.780 and that is sufficient.

01:39:01.860 I think that's what's also happening at the end.

01:39:04.720 So, the reason why I bring this up is because in my lab,

01:39:07.360 we're doing a lot of work on post-traumatic stress disorder

01:39:11.560 and how it looks like a violation of the hyperprior of a just world hypothesis.

01:39:16.320 Right.

01:39:16.820 Right?

01:39:17.420 Yeah.

01:39:17.580 And what we're pursuing,

01:39:19.620 one of the things we're doing is we're seeing of meaning generating,

01:39:22.380 meaning in life generating, not semantic meaning,

01:39:24.720 like the dialectic and the dialogos practices that I did.

01:39:28.060 Right?

01:39:28.220 If they can restore people's sense of religio, connectedness, meaning in life,

01:39:35.000 that helps heal them from the trauma

01:39:38.160 without trying to argue them into that this is ultimately a just world.

01:39:43.320 See, that's, this is what I'm hoping for.

01:39:47.460 I'm hoping that these arguments...

01:39:48.880 That's an experiential replacement for a logical argument in some ways.

01:39:53.200 It's more real than...

01:39:54.960 Well, one of the things that I always did with my clients in therapy,

01:39:59.120 sometimes for post-traumatic stress reasons,

01:40:01.300 was this is where it's not cognitive.

01:40:03.400 It's like, the first thing I would do often was a differential diagnosis,

01:40:07.780 let's say, for people who are depressed.

01:40:10.040 Okay, so there's two...

01:40:11.800 There's more than two, but there's two possibilities.

01:40:14.540 Okay.

01:40:14.960 One is that you're depressed.

01:40:17.000 The other is that you have a terrible life.

01:40:19.700 Okay, so let's take those apart.

01:40:22.260 Do you have a partner?

01:40:23.400 Do you have friends?

01:40:24.220 Do you have family?

01:40:25.180 Do you have a job?

01:40:26.080 Do you have educational resources at hand?

01:40:28.840 You know, are you embedded in a structure of meaning,

01:40:31.080 a multidimensional structure of meaning?

01:40:33.260 Excellent.

01:40:33.700 Where you find purchase.

01:40:35.900 And if the answer to all those questions is no,

01:40:38.240 and sometimes that is the answer,

01:40:40.040 then you're not depressed.

01:40:41.640 Yeah.

01:40:42.000 Like, you might be sad and guilt-stricken and lonely and anxious

01:40:47.300 and show all the symptoms of depression,

01:40:49.740 but your fundamental problem is that,

01:40:52.240 well, you have nothing.

01:40:54.480 Now, you can take someone who's completely different than that,

01:40:57.280 and you find people like this.

01:40:59.280 They're doing fine in all those dimensions of evaluation,

01:41:03.060 and they're depressed.

01:41:04.220 I found, by the way, that those were often people

01:41:06.240 who responded well to an antidepressant.

01:41:08.620 Right?

01:41:09.120 Because their depression wasn't a consequence

01:41:11.660 of the failure of these embedded structures that you described.

01:41:15.060 Now, if you're dealing with someone who has a terrible life,

01:41:19.900 that's when you do,

01:41:22.040 that's when you revert to the level of behavior.

01:41:24.840 It's like, okay, well,

01:41:26.340 why don't we see if we can make you a friend?

01:41:29.280 And then we can evaluate the consequences of that.

01:41:31.740 We've got 50 things here to work on.

01:41:34.140 We can work on one of them

01:41:35.380 and see if that produces a concrete difference.

01:41:37.740 It has very little to do with cognitive restructuring,

01:41:41.540 except insofar as the person might have to restructure

01:41:44.340 their cognitions,

01:41:45.600 terrible, cliche-ridden phrase,

01:41:47.900 to allow themselves to risk attempting to make a friend.

01:41:51.160 Right, of course.

01:41:51.540 Right.

01:41:51.720 But I see the same thing working quite well

01:41:58.060 in the treatment of something like post-traumatic stress disorder.

01:42:00.680 It's like, well,

01:42:01.960 you don't want to retool your explicit representation

01:42:04.420 of the world necessarily,

01:42:06.800 but you might want to see if you can expand

01:42:09.920 the discovery of true intrinsic meaning within your life.

01:42:14.600 The other thing that's often recommended

01:42:17.840 by behavioral therapists is that,

01:42:21.580 say, if you're having someone track their moods

01:42:23.940 if they're depressed across a week,

01:42:25.760 they do that every two hours.

01:42:28.400 And then you see variability,

01:42:29.920 even though they may say they're depressed all the time.

01:42:31.860 There's usually variability.

01:42:33.120 Well, one of the things you find out is,

01:42:34.540 okay, what were you doing when you were worse?

01:42:37.220 And what were you doing when you were better?

01:42:39.000 And could we have you do a little less

01:42:41.020 of what you were doing when you were worse

01:42:42.720 and a little more of what you were doing?

01:42:44.100 That's an empirical, collaborative empiricism,

01:42:46.680 essentially, is how that's described.

01:42:49.920 It's very powerful.

01:42:51.420 I found those behavioral techniques generally

01:42:53.460 much more powerful than any mere cognitive re-evaluation.

01:42:57.600 Not always, but often.

01:42:59.460 Well, yeah, I mean, I would say that that's because

01:43:03.420 ultimately 40 cog size, right,

01:43:05.400 cognition is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended.

01:43:08.160 Yeah, right.

01:43:08.460 And the propositional knowing is sitting on top

01:43:10.360 of the procedural, the perspectival,

01:43:11.960 and the participatory.

01:43:13.020 And you have to bring attention.

01:43:13.680 Oh, you know, that's actually one of the primary things

01:43:16.160 I wanted to talk to you about today.

01:43:17.580 Maybe we'll do that on the Daily Wire side

01:43:19.840 because we have another half an hour.

01:43:21.840 Okay, let's do that.

01:43:22.960 So for those of you who are watching and listening,

01:43:25.860 you can join us on the Daily Wire side.

01:43:29.180 We're going to continue this conversation,

01:43:31.000 but in a pretty targeted direction.

01:43:32.500 I want to talk to John about the embedding

01:43:35.060 of explicit knowledge,

01:43:37.720 the kind of knowledge you can communicate verbally,

01:43:39.620 let's say, in other systems of representation and memory

01:43:42.820 because it sounds like we're dovetailing

01:43:44.820 with regards to the way we're theorizing about this.

01:43:47.720 So if you want to join us,

01:43:49.060 I also want to talk to John

01:43:50.320 about the academic reception of his work

01:43:53.640 and his sense of his impact

01:43:55.720 in the broader public sphere.

01:43:57.660 So we'll do that on the Daily Wire Plus side.

01:43:59.940 I think we came to a good ending point otherwise

01:44:02.500 for this discussion,

01:44:04.100 even though I just soon keep talking to you

01:44:06.000 like for the next week,

01:44:07.200 but we'll do it again in the not too distant future.

01:44:09.380 I would like that.

01:44:10.100 So yeah, yeah.

01:44:10.840 And so for everybody watching and listening,

01:44:13.140 thank you very much for your time and attention

01:44:15.000 and to the Daily Wire people for making this possible.

01:44:17.740 That's much appreciated.

01:44:18.640 The film crew here and John.

01:44:20.520 Thank you.

01:44:20.860 Happy New Year to you.

01:44:21.860 Happy New Year to you too.

01:44:22.640 Yeah, really good to see you, man.

01:44:23.920 Yeah, very good to see you.

01:44:24.720 So join us on the Daily Wire Plus side if you're inclined.

01:44:27.200 Thank you.

414. The Rebirth of the Sacred with John Vervaeke

Summary

Transcript