Transcript for:
Understanding the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke

we are so prone to dynamics of self-deception much of which we are ignorant around the world places of significant affluence you have an increase in suicide and then you have a significant optick in anxiety and depression the loneliness epidemic the addiction crisis how can you make sense of all of this the Golden Threads that runs through all of this is hunger for meaning in life mattering is the sense of being connected to something bigger than yourself so these are the three questions to ask yourself to see have mattering we want it to be real we want the really real when people have mystical experiences transformative experiences and they encounter the really real they will change their lives they will change their relationship just because it is really real that opportunity to break free is intoxicating when we truly open up we find that reality is already ahead of us opening up to [Music] us hey everyone welcome back to the know thyself podcast I'm honored to be sitting down with somebody who is a professor of psychology and cognitive science with a focus on reasoning thinking and cognitive development he also focuses on the development and psychology of wisdom and growing intelligence he's also an expert in Buddhist psychology and philosophy and so he's really able to articulately bridge our modern understanding of the mind with ancient wisdom John Veri thank you for being here Andre it's a great pleasure to be here yeah I'm looking forward to opening up the wide umbrella that is the meaning crisis of where we find ourselves but I would like to first if you're open to sharing your with your own personal meaning crisis sure um because I know that really drove you to understanding it better and supporting so many people with their own you grew up and were really raised in kind of a Christian fundamentalist time and uh what was the transition out of that like can you please walk us through your own personal meeting crisis yeah um so as you said I was brought up in a in a very uh stringent strict uh fundamentalist Christianity not just my immediate family my extended family on my mother's side didn't see much on my father's uh side of my family and um and it was um it was very it was very psychologically fraught uh because my father was lar largely AB an absent person even when he was physically present uh uh he was very challenging figure for me growing up and I only now know looking back both my parents are dead and so I've been going through quite a process of reexamining my relationship with them but now that I have the requisite expertise I would say it's quite probable my dad was autistic and I didn't know it of course when when I was a kid and so I couldn't get why he couldn't pick up on my mental States and um and why he was sort of radically oriented the way he was but that meant he was in many ways absent and so my mother was a dominant figure in my life and something that I only found out about her that has uh caused me I think it's I think I could say I've come to forgive her um it's been kind of a a difficult journey I found this out only much much later um but when she was 15 um her family forced her to marry uh uh because of basically it was kind of like uh prostitution they forced her to marry so that there was a source of income for the family and as you can imagine someone that young being forced into a marriage she ended up having an affair and the person she had an affair with was my father um and so I am literally a bastard and my birth caused the breakup of two marriages and my mom was of course immediately the black sheep of the family for committing the sin of adultery um and so she instead of you know giving up on the Christianity and pulling away from it she wanted back in and so she doubled down and became stricter and more puritanical than anybody else um I didn't know all of this I just grew up with my mom being that way and sensing a deep ambivalence she had towards me because as you can imagine when she's looking at me she's seeing her greatest sin that destroyed so much yet Andre you'll have to forgive me this will sound a little self promotional I don't mean it to be but um she saw something in me she once told me um she said John you were born with an old soul and I named you John because you're a gift cuz she saw that I was like all I was unlike all the other people in my family and you know I'm the only one to go on to University and Etc and so I think she saw in that some sort of redemption and so she was always torn and so she wanted to OTE that side of me but she really also tried to suppress the well to put it in a sentence my sexuality because that had been the source of her sin so I grew up in I know it sounds like a Freudian novel right I I grew up in this very very fraught like very very psychologically fraught deep ambulence weird communication patterns with my father and my mother right none of they were not physically abusive or anything like that right uh but and all of that was mesed with this very very oppressive God that was given in a fundamentalist Christianity very very terrifying and I remember once I came home my mom was always at home and I call him home when I was around 10 years of age and there was no one there and I thought the Rapture had occurred and I was obviously too much of a sinner to be taken into heaven and I've been left behind and the Antichrist and the minions were coming I was well you can imagine for a 10-year-old that was absolutely terrifying I think that's the single most terrifying moment of my life I've been in a hospital emergency room Andre I had an infection in the doctor in my chest and the doctors didn't know what it was and I was looking up my up from my bed and I realized oh crap they think I'm going to die and that was scary that wasn't as scary as that moment back then uh and other moments I remember I was reading in the Bible and I read about the unforgivable sin and I was worried that I had somehow committed it because what is it and how have I done it and how and I got and I was just I I fell into like just profound anxiety my mother could tell I was distressed and she T took me to talk to the pastor of the church as is I was around 12 and he said even to a 12-year-old's ears absolutely useless platitudinous stuff that did not help at all and so I uh as soon as I could you know teenager already teenager Rebellion I I I broke away from that as and I became as as anti as I possibly could sort of an anti-religious U you know aggressive atheist anti-christian uh through and through and but the thing was when you've uh like your religion is like your mother tongue right it's goes deep and I often say it left a taste for the Transcendent and my mouth and I had this model of Jesus as a profound Sage figure um and so I was hungry I was experiencing that lack of a field of transcendence a sage uh role model that I could aspire to that was lacking for me um and so I fell into a kind of profound nihilism and um I became almost nitian and oracular about this and I would sort of pronounce things and I became sort of this is really hard to talk about I I became sort of strangely popular in high school because I had this weird status of people you know kids are at that age they're really fascinated by people who are willing to question things in a profound way and and so that was also very inflationary and that was very problematic so I was getting into the very dark place um I went to University and I decided to take a philosophy course cuz I was sort of interested vaguely in philosophical things and um read the Republic by Plato and met the figure of Socrates and um that resonated with me profoundly and I realized that's who I want to be like and I I started diving deeply into Plato I already started meditating because I would already interested in aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism at that time I'd have to do it at night uh we were very poor I lived in a small bedroom with my sister on a bunk beds and I have to wait till it was dark and I would meditate at the top but um around the same time I had my very first mystical experience and it was an experience of the platonic forms and so I became an Ardent follower were of Socrates and a de a devoted student of uh The Works of Plato if then what happened for me is I wanted to follow that way of life and academic philosophy is not the place to do that I appreciate the educa I got a PhD in philosophy I appreciate all the tremendous skills that academic philosophy gave me but academic philosophy today even today although it's getting better especially at my time was not a place where you go to cultivate wisdom and so I uh there was a literally down the road for me there was a taan meditation center so I went there I'd already been interested in eastern philosophy and uh I I they taught what I would Now call an a Cy of practices they taught me taii Chuan they taught me vapas meditation and meta contemplation and I was just I was opened up and I knew there was some connection between the socratic platonic in this but like I had no way of making connection to it I had done my ma by then and I uh I got very frustrated uh disillusioned with academic philosophy I dropped out for a couple years while I was doing the TA chian and everything and then I heard about this new discipline cognitive science and I realized that cognitive science was the best modern analog to ancient philosophy so I went back and did my B I got a BSC an honors specialist BC in in cognitive science and started to get introduced to for E cognitive science met Evan Thompson friend and colleague at one time at well he's current still my friend but he wasn't my colleague at University of Toronto then I went back and did my PhD in philosophy but on cognitive science and in cognitive science especially 40 cognitive science they were talking about mindfulness and transformative experience and mystical experience and states of Consciousness and it all started coming together so Evan was supposed to teach a course called Buddhism and cognitive science at the University of Toronto his schedule got all mangled up and he couldn't do it and they said well who else could teach that course and he said well John could teach it so I started teaching that course I was already teaching a psychology course on thinking and reasoning and they asked me to teach another one I started and I turned it into the psychology of wisdom and then I took those three courses and started integrating them together and talking more and more about meaning in all those courses and my students eyes would light up and I was going and then when I talked about wisdom their eyes would and I realize oh this is something deeper than just my own personal baggage so I started doing this much much deeper work and I did that for about 10 years really diving deep and integrating all that one of my students came and he said you know you got to put this on YouTube I'm a I'll donate my time I'm a professional videographer my father there's a professional editor we donator time his name was alen Ken and that became Awakening from the meaning crisis and that's how I got into it wow thank you so much for sharing obviously the difficult parts of your journey to to relive but it's uh it really sets a stage stage so perfectly because there's many things you brought up I'm we're going to spend the rest of this podcast unpacking you know one is we all often at different points in our life go through our our own personal meaning crisis the religious asp aspect of things I feel like is is pretty relatable uh in modern society where there is this throwing out of the baby Christ and spirituality with the religious Christian bathwater yes and uh like you said it left the taste of the Transcendent in your mouth I really like that because there is uh there is obviously that fulfilling so so many needs that no longer get met when you leave it and say all of it doesn't work and I'm just so fascinated how you discovered Plato and Socrates and these transpersonal experiences that you had shortly after because that to me is so vital on the path to one's Awakening having an experience beyond the conventional notion of self you know the uh the understanding that like it's like reading a menu versus having a meal and we're in a society with so much information an abundance of information lacking wisdom and these experiences that really taste like tasting truth and talking about it are too completely different things and uh and so I'm really looking forward to weaving the golden thread between all those as best as we can um but I first wanted to go back to what specifically about Plato and Socrates was what what captured you so significantly about their uh the place in which they were coming from and perspective of life well I mean the great the great thing about Plato um I I'm going to use a metaphor he does and it's a little bit fraught given our sort of current identity politics and such but I'm I'm so I'm asking for some charity from the audience when they hear but it's his metaphor and Plato talks about the fact that people have to be seduced into philosophy if you just come at them and just sort of present philosophy face on well he saw what happened to his mentor uh they killed Socrates and he realized um I need to do something else right and and so what what initially often attracts people to Socrates is and you know I'm a young adult um he was winning every argument and that's that sort of really appeals and you know it's very egocentric and but when you get drawn in and then you realize socrates's profound humility and his profound ability to wonder wonder isn't curiosity curiosity is when you lack a piece of knowledge and you go looking for it wonder is a profound willingness and I mean an enacted willingness to call yourself and your world into question and then Socrates gets you doing that because you identify with Socrates and you start doing that and I realized that that calling uh to to a a humble Wonder immediately touched the wound in me the the like and it take it take took time for me to get this retrospectively in reflection that it wasn't so much that I wanted to I I I needed to have something I needed to become someone which is a very different thing uh our culture this is Eric fromm's critique our culture often confuses having things with becoming um and so um that shift out of that modal confusion that realizing oh I need to become someone and I should get out of this mode of trying to get and have but open myself up um and be willing to not know as Socrates said in order to Better Know Myself you have it right here I have a tattooed on my back right here by so um is it in English or Latin or no in English I I've got some I've got like I've got uh Chinese on my arm I have ancient Greek on my legs but uh um and and and also that shift right even there because you can know thyself people can hear it from that having orientation about having their autobiography and how wonderful it is and how unique it is and all that stuff that I think is very very dangerous actually the know th self that Socrates is talking about is not your autobiography it's your owner's manual it's how it's like how do you actually function how do you actually work and you are really deeply unaware of how much you pretend to know and how much you self deceive and then what you then realize once you've been sort of taken through that seduction is you realize how enchained you are right and of course you get Plato's famous story of the people chained in the cave and they need to be liberated and you know work their way out and see the world and that opportunity to let go and break free and to see the really real is intoxicating it's intoxicating I I mean human beings this is one of Plato's greatest arguments that in addition to whatever we want to satisfy our desires we want what satisfies our desires to be real I regularly do this with my students um I'll say so our society trait our society treats romantic relationships as the surrogate replacement uh for God tradition culture the cultivation of wisdom self Transcendence you find the one listen to the religious language you find the one and they will make you whole and complete and all and no human being can bear that and that's why you know our our society is in this weird bind in which people are convinced that the most important way to have meaning in life is a romantic relationship well but if you do regular uh surveys the thing that causes the most suffering in people's lives is romantic relationships and that's because we're we're idolizing uh romantic relationships I'm in a profound one and I'm with the love of my life and she's a fantastic woman but romantic relationships can't bear that burden and so but I'll ask my students how many of you are in deeply satisfying romantic relationships and they'll put their hands up and to say okay I'm I'm now only talking to you of these PE of you guys you folks I should say how many of you would want to know if your partner was cheating on you even if that would absolutely terminate the relationship and they almost all put up their heads and I I'll pick somebody I'll say why why do you want it to end this is giving you all and they say well and and think of this they're all sort of cynical and social media and they'll say without without hesitation well because it wouldn't be real they want it to be real they want it to be real we want it to be real there's a we want the really real when people yayen when people have mystical experiences transformative experiences and they encountered the really real they we know this research they will change their lives they will change their relationships they will change their occupation that will change their habits in order to come into greater contact and Conformity with the really real just because it is really real we have that profound need to be connected to the really real and Plato and Socrates opened me up to that and oriented me to it and showed me a way that afforded me aspiring towards it m in relation to relationships I've heard you say that they that relationships shouldn't be the ultimate but they should be nourished by the ultimate exactly well said you said it okay well said John that's that's a really power powerful distinction though because I think that we do have this Disney ification of romantic relationships as so much expectations and weight put on what they're supposed to be for us um instead of sharing a horizon and being nourished by the ultimate so any extra thoughts you have on that before we move forward yeah like I said I think um I I I want to be careful here because I I want I want to make sure people are are hearing me I'm trying to speak uh in a in a way that's helpful although it may be sound a little harsh treating another person as that which will give you ultimate meaning is actually um it's selfish of you to do that um and because you're demanding something from them for you that they can't ultimately give and so that that puts them into a a deep no no win situation and we can often think but I love the person so much and it seems like an expression of love to do this I you know I I I Revere Sara I dedicated the book to her right um she's easily one of the best if not the best person I've met in my life I think very very highly of her but I there's there there's a do you know the difference between an idol and an icon an idol is something you look at and you want to H you want to control it in your grasp and right be because you think it is it whereas an icon like think of a Catholic person looking at an icon of a saint they don't think the saint is God but they they think that the saint is like a like a stained glass window through which they can have an aperture they have a lens by which they can better focus and realize God Sara is that for me and so that means for me um she becomes a way through which I actually properly carry out the socratic task of transcending myself and I reciprocate I and I want to be a place within myself through which she can transcend herself to what is beyond her and Beyond me and we we we reciprocally open and I just want to share with people that and and this is not because I'm some great relationship Guru I have screwed up so many relationships right and and I you know marriages and like the whole bit I'm finally with the person I'm going to be with for the rest of my life this is through long study and lots of failure right but that relationship where you have where the other person is an icon and not an idol is so humanizing look Plato's great lesson is we need to have the English word isn't good it's tension tension is just negative for us but the the Greek word is tonos like the tonos of a bow or a liar it's the tension that that makes things possible yeah okay so for Plato we are the tonos between finitude and Transcendence I get this from Drew Highland so we we are we are we are we are fallible and finite but if we just identify with that we will fall into Despair and we will be we will become surval and we'll become victims of oppression cuz we are also capable of transcendence we can make great poetry great art we can engage in great philosophy we can participate in profound living conversations we can enter into deeply nourishing loving relationships we're capable of profound Transcendence but if we just identify with our Transcendence we will go through inflation and then we'll become tyrannical and want to oppress other people but if we hold the two together they will correct each other well and this is what you do when your beloved is an icon you constantly are keeping their finitude they are not God if if you'll let me speak poetically but there's a tonos through them to something that is Ultimate and so they shine with something that is beyond them but that something that is beyond them isn't trying to eradicate or destroy them it it presen it is Itself by presencing them even more m so well said I love that we are the tension and I feel like I've I've read in one of the Buddhist texts saying like a blessed life is something approximating just the right amount of suffering yes the friction in a way that is provided afforded to us it gives us through the experiences people circumstances in her life the opportunity to refine and realize her true nature yeah in the Buddhist cosmology you don't want to be born as an animal or a God right um the middle realm yeah and there's a n quote you know Aristotle n's quoting Aristotle he says uh this is nii Aristotle says in order to live alone one asked to either be an animal or a God but one can be both a philosopher there I'm so I am lit up by all the directions in which we're going to explore in this conversation but I do want to set the stage a little bit more with because relationships are one aspect in which we kind of uh deify right this in search of meaning and this amazing book that um was obviously inspired by your life's work research study the amazing YouTube series that you did on the meaning crisis for people that don't know what is the meaning crisis and can you share some stats and some context for just how bad it currently is on the planet right now yeah um so my co-author is Christopher Master petro and we wrote it with the amazing help of meline abran um and um so when people talk about whether or not their lives are meaningful they're using meaning as a metaphor it's like the meaning of a sentence sentences are meaningful you like if I say that doesn't mean anything to you right uh but if I say there's a cat on the mat that means something now what what what goes into that if we if we if we slowly unpack the metaphor we can get a sense of what people are gesturing to with the metaphor so think about how all the words cohere together they cohere together right they make sense together and what they do is they connect you to the world with the possibility of Truth it could be true that the cat is on the m and then you're connected to reality so there's this coherence there's connectedness and the sentence signifies the world to you in a certain way makes the world significant to you in a certain way now if you look at all the work in and I do because um in the psychology of meaning in life not the meaning of life the meaning of of life is some metaphysical proposal we're talking about a cognitive psychological phenomena the meaning in life this is what people are talking about when they say even though my life has been filled with frustration and failure and betrayal and guilt and shame I still want to keep going because my life is Meaningful okay and we can maybe talk a little bit later but it's not the same thing as subjective well-being or Mastery of one's environment so if you take a look at the four there's four features of meaning in life one is coherence what people mean is there's something like the structure of their experience that's like the coherence of a sentence well what does that mean well it co coherence is the opposite of absurdity absurdity is when you have two perspectives that are clashing so that one undermines the other so here we are you and I we're in this this little perspective we're here on the and we're doing all this stuff and it's so meaningful and then I get you to zoom out to the entire universe the cosmic perspective and from that perspective our little lives could seem insignificant right we they could seem absurd there's a clash now before that gets too dark realize that we have a way of dealing with potential absurdity between perspectives and reconciling it with an Insight so we already have a sense of humor that's what humor is humor is when there's a clash between perspectives and then you get an Insight that reconciles it so just to hold that out so people don't IM because when I sometimes say that that's kind of a dark thing to say okay so you want that the next is right when I said the cat is on the map it oriented you it made you look in a particular direction it gave you a focus so the the next factor is called purpose but the problem I don't like that term because our our culture is all about purpose and we think of purpose as some end goal state of something we have to have some status some power I got to get to got to fulfill my purpose the problem with that is if you and I I realized this in high school and I went around writing there is no purpose because I realized even then before I saw any of this research that doesn't work because if you never get it your life was meaningless and once you get it and once you've got your thing your purpose then your life becomes meaningless so don't think about purpose that way think about it as orientation you need a North star something that orients you helps you consistently Focus helps you navigate and track through reality and narrate and keep track of how you're tracking through reality it's an orientation that allows you to narrate and navigate that's what you need the next is significance like the sentence it has to you right things have to be sign you have to have a lot of significance things have you have to have things that seem very real deep not ephemeral superficial to you okay and then finally and turns out most importantly is mattering mattering matters the most mattering is a sense of being uh connected to something I'm going to put in scare quotes because it's another metaphor we have to unpack something bigger than yourself but this goes back to what I pointed out about Plato we want to be connected to something that's really real so this these are the three questions to ask yourself to see if you have mattering what do you want to exist even if you don't what do you want to exist even if you don't that's right got it how really real is it mhm is it not virtual not Emeral not superficial how how much of it how connected are you how much do you matter to it and how much of a difference does it make to you mhm how significant so mattering and significant are turning out to actually be two sides of the same the same connectedness I use the ancient word religio for that sense of connectedness so I'm basically asking you do you have relio is it connected to something that's really real and so much so that you care about it beyond your egocentric concerns those are the three questions now a prototypical answer that people give and it's a right one is well my kids and you know Elizabeth olfield like these your the kids are sacred in that sense sacred is something you wouldn't exchange no matter how much money somebody was willing to give you for it okay so well do you want your kids to exist when you don't well yeah that's the whole project of course I want them to exist when I and I'm trying to make the world a better place for them so when I'm not here they will flourish right are they really real well if you aspire to being a good parent they're way more important than you and they're really real I mean having a child is one of the best ways to turn the arrow of egocentrism out to something other than yourself you're let you're you you come to this Stark realization as wow that being is more important than me right and if I and if I don't live that that child will die right it like I remember that having those moments and they're almost terrifying right and then do I matter to my kids I long to matter to my kids I long to make a difference in their life and they're super significant to me oh and and so right kids are a typical answer of that um now here's one thing and then I'll shut up so you can reply right when you have a kid all the measures of subjective well-being that sort of I feel really good about myself the thing that shows up in beer commercials and I feel really good I'm good I'm happy I'm good yeah yeah yeah that all of that goes away when you have a kid you're sleep deprived you're not eating it's like being in a shipwreck uh you're wet all the time for some reason right uh there's alarms going off that's the kid crying the person you thought loved you most in the world your partner doesn't like you anymore right and you're getting sick all the time why do people do it the subjective well-being is collapsing their finances are going down kids are wickedly expensive so those are the two things we're supposed to be wealth and subjective well-being they collapse what goes up that more than compensates for the collapse in wealth and subjective well-being meaning in life and that's what's at risk in the meaning crisis I know you wanted me to say what it is but maybe I'll stop so you can pick up on anything no I I I would love for you to keep going I just think because the kids is an amazing example where we can see that clearly and people have EI whether they have them or not yeah or they could project when they will they could see clearly being connected to to something that that is sacred that they want to exist and make a difference to irrespective of their own egocentric desires um and collectively right now as you're about to go into there's a crisis of that meaning so please yeah so I mean Chris and I did uh uh whenever I say Chris I mean Christopher Master Petro um after Sara and my kids Chris is the person I love most in the world um I aspire to be Socrates he's my PL um and so uh Plato was you know a friend and deciple of Socrates and he Plato was the beautiful lyrical writer Socrates never wrote anything down so we talked about we talked about the symptomology of the meeting crisis a bunch of things that we can see happening um so around the world you've got a weird thing happening in in so for example in places of significant a fluence Silicon Valley you have an increase in suicide a significant increase in suicide you have in the affluent countries so affluence is supposed to make everybody just want to be happy and continue to live um you have um the the generation the the the two generations that are sort of coming up um suicide rates going up in the United States uh children are now committing suicide um so the age at which people committing suicide is going down of course and you have the massive increase in the deaths of Despair happening in the United States but there there are similar things happening elsewhere in the world um and then you have the significant optic in anxiety and depression disorders that um are are sort of overwhelming our institutions I'll give you a personal anecdote rather than giving empty statistics I'll give you a personal anecdote uh that I think is exemplary of this and I I want to make it clear that I'm not criticizing any of my students when I do this I'm expressing compassion so when I started teaching at the University of Toronto way back in 1994 I'd get one maybe two students a year coming in with sort of mental health distress or needing an extension for an essay once in a blue moon I'd have a student come in and cry break down I now get 5 to 10 a week regularly reliably I'm not trained to handle that and the university is not the institution to handle even though it's being mandated I don't know what it's like in the United States but in Canada the government is putting increasing pressure on us to somehow provide Mental Health Services and accommodations and and you know and and there's a there's an issue of Justice there that I'm I'm not I'm not challenging that's not what I'm talking about I'm trying to point out a level of mounting distress and the universities are canaries in the coal mine for the culture right but you've got the prevalence of that you've got the loneliness epidemic uh reliably decade by decade the number of close friends that people have is going down the UK government has set up a Ministry of loneliness it sounds like something out of George Orwell um so you have that you have the addiction crisis that seem why are so many people falling into addiction very and we even coming up with new forms of addiction like video game addiction um and video game addiction by the way is really really bespeaks the meaning crisis because why why do the kids get addicted to the video games because the video game has what is lacking in their real experience the video game makes sense it's coherent yeah right they they have an orientation there's a journey they're going on and they're navigating and there's narration and and they have a clear role they they're connected to it they matter to it they make a difference and they know how to transcend themselves they can literally level up and so this is an intoxicating drug compared to the poverty of that in their in their lives it's like a coherent Shadow reality in which they derive meaning and a career and like and you you better believe that the L M the are the large language models the emerging AGI is going to exacerbate that um already I know cuz people are writing to me about it already people are taking pseudo religious relationships up with these entities I've only heard of and I haven't dug into the report in depths and you should never think there's a single cause of somebody committing suicide but there was a 14-year-old that recently committed suicide and we're talking to an llm that was taking was an avatar of some figure from Game of Thrones B and it looked like it was a dis the the the discussion with the llm brought up the topic of suicide why the child even proposed suicide should come to our mind and then the tunnel down the opposite of that reciprocal opening I was talking about reciprocally narrowing into suicide and we get we get this overwhelming fervor around mythological worlds like look at the look at the look at the anger and it's religious anger that people have with the with the you know with the corruption of the MCU or the star worlds World they get like it's like people used to be about their religion they get so incensed and so angry about these completely fictional characters in this completely fictional world right you have of course the Psychedelic Renaissance that psychedelics are booming the mindfulness revolution in which mindfulness is being taken up and people are exploring in both of these alternative States Of Consciousness there's good and bad in that you have the you have the reemergence of otherwise deeply neglected and I mean academically neglected uh philosophies as a way of life like stoicism can you imagine stoicism is now a burgeoning industry like what is going on stoicism um and so I think all of this I what we argue is what what how can you make sense of all of this well what the golden thread to use one of your terms that runs through all of this is a hunger for meaning in life a hunger for that connectedness that you know that that Clarity that orientation that that capacity for getting more and more deeply in contact with the depths of reality within and without aspiring to be something more than you are coming into relationship to something more real than your egocentric existence there's a h and it's growing so if you take a look at the nuns the no NES the fastest growing demographic group well doesn't that prove that atheism is on the rise no because if you take a look at them they are not primarily atheists they are Seekers primarily and they are they are filled with people that are filled with various kinds of Supernatural beliefs and weird alternative metaphysical orientations that many of them are spiritual but not religious in a profound way if you take a look one just a few more stats if you take a look at you know sort of the Enlightenment I mean that period of European history you know the 17th and 18th century that has so has given us our fundamental grammar for how we think about ourselves in the world it gave us a story about why people are religious well people are religious because they're not clear thinkers right and people become atheists when they become they're analytic and clear thinkers or they're religious because they're in you know very dire circumstances and once they're sort of economically situated that you know then they sto being religious and and when I'm a scientist actually look at the research done by and large by atheist by the way showing that that's not why people are believers or not Believers that's not why people are believers because they have lived with other people that they consider credible trustworthy individuals that are wiser than themselves and what we do with those people is we internalize their perspectives you you and I we reflect on ourselves cuz we have internalized how other people reflect on us and we imitate them doing it and that's how we get our ability to know ourselves we get it by internalizing other people so if your parents were particularly religious and you found them wise you will be so if they were atheistic and you found them credible you you will you will be so now why does that matter to the mean crisis well you know how the West really lost God by edad if you look at countries that are by and large secularist there's a high correlation between being secular and how much people live alone they live by themselves right and when we live by ourselves we lose that Network we lose that Network that gives us a a greater capacity for meta perspectival awareness and one last connection and then I'll shut up again I was privileged to take part in um a paper uh published paper high impact Journal uh led by eager grman somebody I know um we got as many of the wisdom researchers psychologists neuroscientists cognitive scientists philosophers in one place either physically or virtually we called ourselves the wisdom TR the wisdom task force it sounds really exciting and we actually turned out a consensus paper on what wisdom is and one of the core features is perspectival metacognition the ability to take multiple perspectives uh on a situation and and reflect on yourself through alternative perspective so as we become alone we've become lonely we've lost wisdom and we've lost the that we've lost that perspectival meta cognition that's at the center of wisdom all of that has contributed to the meaning crisis a quick share one health tool that I have absolutely loved over the years is red light therapy which by the way has over 4,000 peer-reviewed studies many of which show how it helps with cellular healing skin Health by stimulating collagen testosterone sleep mood and so many others I personally can feel the benefits in real time and think it's a great way to get healthy light in the morning before Sunrise especially during the winter months where there's less sunlight outside just 10 to 20 minutes a day is enough Bond charge is a great option for red light devices because they have the lowest EMF on the market there's no Flicker and their devices both have near infrared and red light they make great gifts for family members also for the holidays they ship worldwide very quickly they're easy with returns and exchanges and also have an array of other science back products that you can check out go to bond charge.com thyself and use coupon code no thyself to save 25% that's b o n c h r ge.com thyself and use code know thyself to save 25% Bond charge products are all HSA FSA eligible giving you taxfree Savings of up to 40% I hope you dig it back to the episode all right so in the realization that this is what's happening we observe the many different compensatory behaviors that arise such as parasocial relationships consumer identity New Age spirituality without rigor a lot of these things arise out of that space of individ ual ISM and not being connected to like like you were speaking to with community and so many different things and so if you had to boil it down which is uh probably unfair to try to make you do I'll try for the reason of why collectively this meaning crisis is happening what would you say are the main contributors so because our cognition it's so intelligently adaptive by being really dynamically self-organizing and complex and multi-leveled and that makes it so powerful adaptive right and it orients us and it binds us to the world it's also profound engine of self-deception we are profoundly capable and this is a I do a lot of work on irrationality and rationality we are so prone in ways of which we are myself included I'm saying we to dynamics of self-deception much of which uh we are ignorant so you know one thing that people do and this this shows up in social media uh people have probably heard of this but that doesn't mean you're not being affected by it because it largely affects you unconscious confirmation bias you will tend to only look for evidence that confirms something you want to believe is true and you will tend to not find Salient that means it attracts your attention and and and makes you interested you will tend to discount or reduce the salience of things that might challenge your belief and so right when you go on social media where you have the pretense that you're inter interacting with independent other people who could challenge you but in fact you're selecting who and what you can hear from so you're pretending that you're getting critical feedback and you're not you can magnify the confirmation bias and engage in something sort of like confirmation porn right and so we are we and that's just one of many examples we are beset by self-deception so and and and this is not largely a matter just of belief like you were talking about earlier it's how we taste things it's how we perceive things it's our state of consciousness our traits of character so we need practices we can't just change our beliefs we have to change our skills our traits our states and our relationships and so we need practices to do this now there is no panace of practice there's technical reasons for that there's no one practice that can alleviate all of your problems of self-deception because every practice has a bias built into it so what you need are you need you need practices that complement each other that work in opposite directions so for example I went to the taii said they had a meditation practice meditation makes you stand back and look at how you're framing the world now that's good but if I always only do that I'm in trouble I also need to put my glasses back on and see if I can now see more deeply well that's contemplation so you need to be moving between a meditative practice and a contemplative practice you need to complement a seated practice like the medit and the contemplation with a moving practice mindful practice like ta chian see see they all they they compensate and correct and constrain each other so you need a it's like an Ecology of organisms right you need an Ecology of practices and you need Role Models remember what I said you have to internalize other people so you need an Ecology of practices you need a common Unity a community of role models and you need an overarching story that orients you and helps you navigate and narrate you need a mythology in the um positive sense of the word what used to do that for us was religion religion religio religion was about when it's working because religions can go wrong just like everything else can go wrong politics can go wrong the market can go wrong right Science and Technology can go wrong right but we'll talk about when it's working what religion is doing is it giving us he right it's giving us a tradition a community a Mythos and an Ecology of practices for addressing self-deception and enhancing that connectedness that we that religio that's at the core of meaning in life it's for is was a place for people to go to cultivate wisdom in a way that transferred back into that was that was crafted over generations to transfer back into their lives in a regular and reliable way now for a lot of historical reasons and a lot of moral reasons and I'm not here to challenge those and I'm not here prizz right we have as you said we've thrown out that Christian framework but as you said we threw out the baby with the bath water we've we've taken away all of that functionality so now and wisdom is not optional wisdom is not optional when we are confronted by challenges when we're confronted by absurdity alienation anxiety when we get confused between having and being when we when we idolize things inappropriately when we're disconnected when we feel our like our world and our reality is beset by uh right we have very little resources so I'll ask my students where do you go for information they'll hold up their phone like cyborgs right I'll say where do you go for knowledge and they're a little bit jaist about this right uh the university science uh and then I say where do you go for wisdom and there's an anxious silence and they look at me like tell me where I should go and that's a dangerous position for somebody to be in right so we we lost all of that functionality we tried to replace it we've tried to replace it with various isms pseudo religious ideologies with nationalism and Nazism and communism um and we drench the world in blood because ideologies can't do it um commercialism celebrity worship all of this all the stuff we've been talking we try to fill it and it doesn't have the function yeah we've so largely in modern society traded nutrient-dense Behavior with those vapid and poor substitutions oh I love that phrasing wow love it but yeah you're speaking to like you know for example porn instead of real intimate connection with another um so to speak sitting around the campfire real intimate personal connections with social media yes um the innumerable examples of of of this right and so in search of soul food we have these poor substitutions it's like we're lacking nutrient density quite literally and we're malnourished yes yeah and so that's a really important thing that I want to continue to highlight yeah I want to this is a beautiful metaphor sorry you really spark something of me uh because one of the things that can happen is you can be malnourished without being hungry if because you're eating a lot of junk food right so let me play with this for a second one of the things is that people can often be beset by the meaning crisis without realizing that they are because they're malnourished but they're not currently in distress and what they what they don't realize is like when you're when you're when you have nutritional malnourishment right your physiological resilience your ability to resist disease or to heal from trauma is radically reduced now until the disease or trauma comes along you don't notice it but when it comes you're in a disaster it's the same thing for the meaning crisis people are sort of drifting around I'm okay right until something happens and then they realize and I see it at the University like I said there's no depth of resilience and Co showed that when so many people were thrown back into a genuine challenge to their everyday routines many people went like in like they got into very dire I predicted one of the negative things I predicted sorry this is one of these weird things where you're happy about something you predicted because you're a scientist but because you're a human being and you hate that it came true I predicted a massive increase in SK spirituality which happened I predicted a mental health tsunami that would happen those are the indications spirituality is a terrific symptom of the meaning crisis Co hit there was no resiliency and the meaning crisis then demonstrated conspirituality conspiratorial spiritual yes ideations yeah so if if you if I was I was privileged to watch a really good documentary where somebody went to qinon meeting and what's really interesting is it's got exactly the the the the the structure of a Christian service there's like a there's a sermon there's singing There's readings there's social networking it's not just a cons cons iracy Theory it's a shared world view that gives people a orientation a sense that they've cut through the to something that's real they're connected to themselves to other people they they there's something that matters it feeds the meaning crisis and it feeds it with a pernicious narrative this is good stuff yeah this is important any other main contributors you want to highlight um for because well you can see that the the like the entertainment world and and uh and the political Arena two more so we've got this turn towards the dark in our popular media increasingly dark and people I've I've seen people praise something just because it was dark and I'm dark I'm tired of dark like it's like oh it's so dark it's like and and but see the dark is at least closer to the reality of the situation and that's why people like it does observing how past civilizations have risen and Fallen inform us how we like about our current situation oh very much very much let me just say the thing about the political Arena um a symptom of the meaning crisis is people feel increasingly disenfranchised disconnected like it doesn't matter it's all just an arena of I'm using that term technically Harry frankf fort's notion of it right yeah and at the same time everything is fraught with the political fervor everything we do is politicize even like you can't do anything now without the political aspects of it and people right and and the relationship the political positions PE people take up are very much religious there there's cultish relationships there's symbolic acts of tearing down I'm I'm metapolitical I think both the left and right are guilty of exacerbating the meaning crisis so I want it clear that I'm criticizing both sides here right and you've got this it's pseudo religious behavior all over the place all these symbolic Act we're doing and we're doing it for these very very comprehensive worldviews and people completely identifying it it that's a religious phenomena I'm not the only one saying that everyone's now so anthropologically what's happening especially in American politics but you can see it in European politics too and Canadian politics is it's trying to take it's it's it's acting as a I'll use your metaphor a non-nutritious surrogate for religion now to your question ENT historical question we talk about it Chris and I in the book the west or whatever that ultimately refers to has gone through a a significant meaning crisis before um so Alexander the Great conquerors most of the know world I mean that's not really true India and China were still out there but you know what I mean right um and um and you know and he heniz all of that and and so and then he dies without leaving a a determinate air and then it breaks up in these smaller Empires that are all fighting each other so I want you to compare somebody that's living in the time after Alexander with somebody who's living in the time before Alexander the time of Aristotle the guy who taught Alexander so in the time of Aristotle you live in the same place as the people who govern you do and you and your ancestors have been there for multiple Generations so and your neighbors too and the families all know each other and you speak the same language and you share the same religion you have the same concerns the same projects and in fact you're so bound to this that you'd rather be killed than suffer the punishment of being ostracized which is forced to leave your home that is one of the greatest punishment we look at this in the ancient world they threatened him they threaten to ostracize him and we go okay I'll move from Hamilton to La who cares this is the Titanic punishment in the ancient world now you go to after Alexander where you're living the the rulers are thousands of miles away you could go to bed and you're in the toic Empire and you wake up you wake up and you're in the salate Empire the people around you speaking different languages worshiping different gods you've probably migrated they've probably migrated you feel completely out of L of home you you have a dwelling but you experience what's called domicide you don't feel at home so you can see in the art and especially the philosophy of the time an anxiety it's called an Age of Anxiety this helenistic period and what happens is philosophy changes it takes on an extra Dimension they build on what was given to them by Socrates Plato and Aristotle but they add a dimension the the philosopher becomes the physician of of the Soul Epicurious one of the great hel helenistic philosophers captured it perfectly he said call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others so the philosopher takes on this therapeutic Dimension and you get these entire ways of life like stoicism and epicureanism that attempt to diagnose your anxiety and it's it's existential anxiety it's a meaning crisis and they they they diagnose and then they prog and they give you a prognosis which isn't having a bunch of beliefs it's about they give you an entire Ecology of practices and they give you a community and they give you exemplary figures like epicurus like Socrates like Plato that are then take they basically turn philosophy into a religion in the positive sense of the word as a way of addressing the meaning crisis that's by the way why stoicism from that time is so popular right now now and it also points to another thing in the meaning crisis we're going through massive therapy every third person you know is in therapy right and what and a lot of these therapies are deeply influenced by the helenistic philosophies like cognitive behavioral therapy one of the most pervasive form of therapies is explicitly derived from stoicism none of this is coincidence the scale we're seeing it at is just obviously puts us at exponential risk to the meta crisis in so many ways because I mean you go to like what 1810 is where there's like 500 million people on the planet to now just in 2 years to over 8 billion yes the scale in which things have transpired is quite astonishing and I'm just curious because you can look back at those times and kind of pull um pull things from but like we've never experienced the scale of individualism as we currently are in in today's day and age and so obviously that puts out put is at risk for so many things and we have massive technological powers that was not out of gr yeah I mean we we we're like and you know before well I mentioned it with Alexander's Empire there's still the the terrifically Deep civilizations of India and China and there's all what's going on meso America the you know the Incans and the Mayans and all that but now we have this Global thing and I'm not saying there aren't indigenous cultures or things like that but there is it's Global there is something outside so not only is there more there more people and there's more technological power and that that technology has the power the potential to run away with itself like the llms there isn't also there isn't an outside civilization right we have the one Global civilization and the meaning crisis is a form of what's called scarcity uh scarcity mentality scarcity when when whenever you're uh lacking a something that's nutritive I'm going to keep playing with your metaphor because it really sparked me okay so you have scarcity uh you you you lack food you get well I don't know but you but I get hangry when I lack food um and so what happens when you in a scarcity mentality think about when you're hry right you you you become very short-term in your thinking you become very narrow you become very aggressive you become very egocentric and you become very rigid right does it sound like our political Arena by the way so when people are starving for meaning they go into a scarcity mentality that actually really harms our cognitive ability to deal with the poly crisis the metac crisis of challenges we're facing in the world so the metac crisis is it's it it so people look out at the world and the metac crisis helps like even darken more the meaning crisis because the world seems even more threatening and then the meaning crisis hamstrings us so we become less and less capable of dealing with the world and what's happening is we're reciprocally narrowing the world is getting we're losing options in the world and and we're losing our cognitive capacity in the face of it and we are reciprocally narrowing down where we're feeling trapped it feels like the way that you even just physiologically kind of displayed that was you know one of the worst or perhaps the worst punishment one could give someone as solitary confinement oh yeah and we've kind of been somehow societally convinced to will willingly put ourselves in a version of that in our own bedrooms with technology and like you spoke to earlier I think you would assume that an increase of affluence and comfort and Technology would increase well-being but like you're speaking to that knowledge and information without wisdom is like exacerbating the issue even further and so for everyone who's listening I promise we're going to come up for air soon and explore those ecology practices and things that can really develop our own individual personal meaning crisis but any other thoughts you have there on the aspect of how technology and comfort like I want to pick up and did do you that's also I think very insightful to amplify it so think about you know um like you said uh loneliness think think about these really deeply effective and and and and and they're very comprehensive they they they they they they they sink into the depths of your soul and they they color and pervade your whole world when you're lonely think about when you're homesick so we have done this thing where we're making people homesick within their culture so they're lonely they're homesick they're starving and the technology is not helping the technology is magnifying it's it's like I said with the conf with the confirmation porn right it's it's magnifying all of this and it's giving us the OTS surrogates the the the false substitutes oh well I don't have friends but I have all these social connections right um well I'm not at home but I can go into this virtual world where I play an important role right while I'm starving uh for meaning uh so what I'll do is I'll fill myself with more and more intensity of experience so you know musicologists have talked about the fact that uh the complexity of popular music is rapidly eroding because we are more and more pumping the intensity and the salience at the expense of any attempt to convey profound transformative meaning it's like a dopaminergic roller coaster right and yeah and so what we happen it people are attracted to that because they're in scarcity mentality but it doesn't feed them so they stay hungry and then the whole thing exacerbates in a vicious cycle yeah it's like the hungry ghost analogy for me from Buddhism yes yes excellent you're on fire oh thanks you're on fire too fire conversations okay so bringing this a little bit more into the personal please for our own personal quest for meaning you know how does contemplating what will matter most upon death uh reveal what we should how we should change our behaviors and values and how we're living currently because I think on the personal quest for meaning um I've heard you speak to the importance of wisdom and friendships you know and being connected to like what you said earlier things that have value and meaning to you beyond your own personal egocentric survival um and so I'll would be curious to to hear your thoughts on what is going to matter most to us uh when we're going to face death and how that should inform how we live this is this is brilliant so if you give people if you prime priming is when you just give people information and you don't make it sort of explicit but it affects their behavior so when you prime people about markers like you you having people read a whole bunch of words and they're just reading words you tell them it's a reading comprehension task but in the list there's words like coffin skeleton corpse right all this you know and and when you make that sort of salient to people in that way people go into scarcity mentality and they get very rigid at least this is what the what's called mortality research or Terror management Theory shows I have some questions about the methodology but I think overall it's reasonable that they found a phenomena so and if I just give you the propositional facts no notice what that does that locks you down but now let's move away from the propositional let's move to the perspectival right now I ask people to imagine that they're dying they're in death reflection and they can have the people around them that has the the opposite effect on them now they come out of that and they open up and they start to wonder and they start to look for these deeper connections because people through death reflection sounds morbid eh through death reflection people come to the realization of the things that really do matter to them they'll say I care about the relationships I've had not only to other people but to reality and to myself I I I care about like the good I've done I've I've cared about the truth I've said and the things that we're told are going like we're supposed to be pursuing they don't come up they don't matter because they don't matter they don't contribute to meaning of life because you see when you're facing death subjective well-being and wealth are going away the only thing that the only thing you're going to carry with you to your last moment in your confrontation with death and this was the great Insight of epicurus and the stoics is your meaning and wisdom that's it and so that what so if you shift off the propositions of mortality and you shift to no no take up the perspective take up the lived experience of you know actually imagin reflecting on death what becomes Salient are the things that have contributed to meaning in life is that in a way our attempt to exist for like to to live longer in a way so you might think that um but um I mean I've done a lot of Buddha Buddhist practices and and there's something similar in stoicism um and those practices are designed to make one horrified of immortality um so I mean I I I can't do the whole practice here but it'll give you an intuitive sense for it so you want to live forever right well then all you watch all your friends die oh well then they have to live forever too and then all of their friends and all of their friends and basically nobody can die okay that's a problem so what are we going to do uh does that mean nobody's going to be born there's no more kids how meaningful is existence without children and now is it just that none of the people can die well none of their pets should die and then oh my gosh and then what you realize is the entire universe has to freeze and not change at all and then you realize okay I'm going to go on forever and ever which means I'm going to have an Infinity of events where I screw up where I fail where I let myself and other people down where I betray I'm going to have an Infinity of those can I bear that and then we're all going to get to a place where we have an Infinity of guilt and shame are we going to can we bear that with each other can we forgive infinitely each other and then if I live I've changed a lot since I was four if I live forever will I change so much that I'm virtually unconnected to the person I am now inevitably so even if I don't die physically John Veri it's gone absolutely and so it's even futile and when you really live this you realize wait I don't want any of that that's horrific and so then you have to ask what is it people think they want with immortality this is at least the Buddhist proposal what people and this was the stoic model people think they want to have a long life but what they want to do is they want to be they want to live as deeply as possible so here's a story from Julian uh uh barnes's history of the world in nine and a half chapters and it spoiler alert this was in the good life okay so the uh the good life made use of this I don't have if if if they explicitly but the connection is obvious this guy dies he goes to heaven he meets St Peter and he plays golf until he can play it as best as he possibly he does all these things and then he comes to St Peters and he says you know and this is what happens in the good life I'm kind of done I'm kind of done and St Peter said good that's the point of Heaven the point of Heaven isn't to live forever because you're not God you're finite and you have to remain finite the point of Heaven is for you to die willingly with right what the stoic say is that now that's that's a mythological thing or it's a TV show The stoics say but that is available to you right now if you practice you could get to the place where you would be happy to die now because you have touched the depths of existence and got the most religio that is possible for a human being and that's what they live for and that's why they were so courageous that's why they would and you have to be really careful about this that's why they were willing to advocate for suicide in this very limited circumstance in which it was the only way to prevent them from engaging in immoral vicious behavior and senica for example did this so I I do think that we've I mean obviously there's a biological urge to keep on living but we can reflect on that we can move from a scarcity mentality of just want to live to a wise perspective a reflective perspective where we say no what I want is I want to live as deeply as possible death in our own mortality I feel like really affords us an opportunity unlike anything else to truly can you know confront I'm glad that I'm mortal I glad that I'm mortal what you're saying is I'm very very glad I don't I I mean I'll I mean if a truck is bearing down on me I'll get out of the way but I deeply don't want to live more than another 20 years but I would push back on the notion and say let's jump 20 years from now would you want to live an extra day one more day ah I've seen people ding I've been with people dying I'm old enough now and I've seen the difference from people dying who wanted to live another day and the anxiety and the terror and people who are ready to go they and and I don't mean people who ready to go because they're beset by pain they're done yeah and their lives are done and they feel a completeness I've been with them I want to be them I aspire to being them so will I be like that you're asking me I don't know do I aspire to be like that and is it possible yes yeah I I think it's a really beautiful place to arrive to also similarly strive and to live life with a sense of abandon in in that regard as well how much do you feel like in regards to belief and our our need to make meaning and believe things as human beings is driven through our insecurity of not knowing because death is obviously a huge uncertainty yeah and sometimes uh often times we as humans create all sorts of beliefs U and dogmas to to uh cure that insecurity of oh yeah yeah so I mean this goes more towards my cognitive scientific work and the work I do with some terrific colleagues uh a dear friend of mine he was a former student of mine um and now he's a dear colleague of mine Mark Miller and the whole predictive processing framework that the idea that the brain is trying to anticipate the world as much as it possibly can as a way of being adaptive and so um radical uncertainty can be horrifying um uh but of course and we've tried part of what the enlightenment promised was we'll give you certainty we we dayart will give you certainty we'll give you a formal system that is complete and consistent and will render everything certain and we now know because of godal and Einstein that is logically and physically impossible and the world is actually complexifying with emerging information so it is radically uncertain it's not just that there are risk risks are probabilities negative or positive negative usually that we can calculate uncertainty is we are radically ignorant right and so what we have to do is give up that Enlightenment promise of certainty um obviously pursue as much knowledge as we can but instead the shift and you see this in all of the helenic philosophies you see it in Buddhism and Daoism and this is like really I mean especially in Buddhism and DSM where Zen you get Z Zen by integrating budh is and DOW together let's try something else so I'll use an analogy uh from biology you you could there's the evolution of traits like you know we've evolved this particular trait but biologist and bi biology is the science that's going through the scientific a scientific revolution right now biology is the philosophically important science right now my colleague at the University of Toronto Dennis Walsh is a clear example of that um physics is theoretically more abundant that's why they had to give the Nobel Prize to a cognitive scientist computer scientist colleague of mine for the University of Toronto and yes all truth does come from the University of Toronto Jeffrey Hinton got the Nobel Prize in physics because they can't find an actual physicist to give it to okay so but in biology they're now talking about the evolution of evolvability right so you're not evolving a particular trait because a trait depends on a certainty in the environment what you evolve is the meta trait of evolvability which is the capacity to constantly redesign yourself adaptability adaptability but a constantly well I'm a constantly evolving adaptability yeah uh so that you can constantly refit and readapt yourself to an environment that always will contain an element of uncertainty in it I think this is one reading uh this is one half of the first Noble Truth of Buddhism that like you know the world is pervaded by duka the world is radically uncertain and that's that that's the world side and our side is we are radically prone to self-deception and we can do a lot to reduce the self-deception in the face of the uncertainty so that we can significantly reduce the loss of agency and suffering um uh and and I think that is what we should be striving for Quick Share did you know that you are a walking community and that the roughly 38 trillion bacteria that live in and on you especially in your gut are essential to whole body Health we wouldn't exist without them the balance and quality of your microbiome drastically affects your skin mood digestion and basically everything about you seeds DS1 daily symbiotic benefits your gut skin and heart health in just two capsules a day I personally have noticed improved digestion and gut health and I just love that I can trust seed because of how intentional they are as a brand and science back they are holding all 24 clinically and scientifically studied strains of bacteria art in supporting your overall Wellness as well as how convenient and sustainable their form of delivery is with no synthetic or chemical Coatings as well as no binders or preservatives get ahead of the new year with a routine that helps you now by going to seed.com thyself and use code 25 no theyself to get 25% off your first month that's 25% off your first month on seeds DS1 daily simbiotic seed.com thyself code25 no thyself back to John amazing the this conversation is very Nutri and dense for me and I'm I'm excited to keep unpacking a few different aspects now a little bit more in the realm of understanding your mind leaning and pulling from your Buddhist philosophical understandings and cultivating a life of wisdom and so where I'd like to start is for you to share what are the four types of knowing and how is that useful I've been alluding to it throughout so thank you Andre for giving me a chance to talk about this so one of the things the enlightenment did as well as it uh it it convinced us of two interlocking things it convinced us that all knowing is propositional knowing and that we do not have to undergo transformation in order for certain truth to be disclosed to us dayart proposes a universal method of calculating with propositions and uh livits proposes a universal calculus and you don't have you don't have to transform in order for reality to disclose itself to you all you have to do is Master the method and then apply the method universally and you'll get all the truths that are possible now if you go before the enlightenment you get a much different picture if you're taking a look for example within the Christian neoplatonic tradition there is the radically alternative proposal that there are many aspects dimensions of reality that will will only be disclosed to you after you go through significant uh transformation self-transcendence you see so soon as you get rid of that transformative notion and then you lock everything into the propositional you lose the other kinds of knowing so each kind of knowing has its own kind of memory like psychologically own kind of memory and its own sense of realness so the one we're all fixated on is what's called propositional knowing knowing that something is the case like knowing that and I always St a proposition the cat is on the mat right there's a proposition and your sense of realness is a sense of conviction that it is true and you have a type of memory for that called semantic memory you know by the way that cats are mammals yes and that's it you just have that sort of fact proposition right and you nod you have a sense of conviction for it now notice how that's very different from your procedural knowing you're knowing how to do something you're knowing to swim you're knowing how to catch a football so propositional is knowing what a bike is procedural knowing is how to ride a bike how to ride a bike and notice the difference there right propositions are true or false you're not riding a bike right now so does that mean your skill of bike writing is false that that doesn't make any sense right skills apply or not they have conditions of application not conditions of referential completion right so you're not talking about something you're you're causally interacting with it which means the sense of realness is the sense of empowerment you know what it's like to write a like you get that sense of ah I can ride a bike and then you have a kind of memory that's distinct from your semantic memory called procedural memory now why aren't you riding a bike right now I presume you're not riding a bike right now because you have Consciousness which means you know what it is like to be you here in this state of mind in this situation or at we use an artistic metaphor for that you have a perspective right now and you are you have a Viewpoint a point of view from that perspective this is a way of talking about that perspectival knowing you know what it is like to be you here now in this state of mind in that situation and you have a you have its own kind of memory it's called episodic memory so compare the the memory I'm going to ask for you now okay what did you have for breakfast this morning I had nothing right now uh searching and are you sort of imagining it a bit um well because I had nothing for breakfast that uh oh that it's not going to work it's not going to work as well okay uh did you did you brush your teeth this morning I did okay so what happens when you remember doing that I remember this um series of events that I normally always go through right so you remember the series of events you relive a sequence of events you and so what you do is you go back and you have a little tiny narrative a little tiny story so and it's and what that story reflects is your perspective on the situation that's what an episode is an episode is a slice of perspectival knowing so you have episodic memory and this is the memory we cherish because you know it's about the events that matter to us and are significant to us which are different than the facts that we think are true right okay so um and your sense of realness for perspectival knowing is not power it's not a a sense of conviction it's a sense of presence so I can do it with you right now reality is presencing it's the sense of presence right as opposed to things not being here being absent it's present it's really present and that's that's another sense of realness and people often have that sense really powerful when they're having a mystical or psychedelic experience or when they're really in when they feel like they're really in a video game it's so real I'm in it right that's a sense of presence that perspectival knowing is that like similar to where I suppose gnostics and Mystics derive their sense of Knowledge from like it's the interiority experence so let's let's talk about the Greek words you're because you're using a gnostic so uh the Greeks have epist for prop largely propositional knowing where we get epistemology from they have tech for procedural knowing where we get technology ology from they have noesis which means knowing by noticing it's and it gives you an you have Insight notice how this is all events of Consciousness and perspective that's noesis and in the neoplatonic and the mystical Traditions you move from you move into a noetic understanding but you involved another word gsis and it goes into the gnostics and it's in our word prognosis and D di agnosis okay let's talk about the gnostics what kind of knowing were they after um they're after of knowing that liberates you narciss narcissism has a terribly Tangled mythology that's got a lot of danger to it so I'm I'm putting that aside I'm talking about we're talking about the psychology agnostic feels existentially they feel entrapped and they're trying to be liberated and and what they're trying to do is realize their true identity and bring that true identity the spark within them into move it into relationship to where it really belongs and connects to what's ultimately real it's about realizing like the doctor when they're diagnosing you they're trying to figure out what's going on inside of you and transform you into another state of being this is what nus is is that okay so this is participatory knowing this is the knowing that is about how you are coupled to the environment how you and the environment are participating in the same patterns the same processes the same principles right so like for example you can walk around in this room because you and the room both are participating in gravity does that does that make sense okay and you don't have to know this participatory knowing can be largely unconscious like when the doctor is diagnosing you your body know knows that it's ill but that doesn't mean you have a conscious understanding of it okay so you can be coupled or not to the environment right and now that coupling can often call for transformation you have to know thyself in order to know the world differently there has to be a change in the way the agent and the arena so when the world makes sense to you it's an arena for your agency and the the a agent and the arena have to be mutually transformed that's nosus that's participatory knowing so participatory knowing is stored in a very weird kind of memory it's your sense of self you have a sense of self don't you you have a a knowing through and through relationship as well yes it's knowing it's knowing it it's the the relationships that shape your identity so your roles participatory knowing involves the knowing that has happen through the roles you take up you're a friend you're you know you're a podcaster you're a lover you have different roles and and and then you have to do a through line through the you you I I I assume like most people you don't want to be suffering massive cognitive dissonance in which all these roles are undermining each other you want them to be coherent right and make sense together and so you try to draw a through line between all the roles all the patterns you participate in that's yourself that's what your sense of self is right so why does knowing the distinction between these four how does that impact our life well what's the sense of realness for the participatory knowing it's a sense of and you won't because it's largely unconscious you will probably only become aware of it when it's Disturbed when the sense of being connected to reality and having a genuine authentic agency in that arena is lost the sense of realness is meaning in life the participatory knowing is where a lot of the meaning in life is being held and then above that right it's held in the perspectives you take what you notice in the world what's Salient to you we we're talking about that and then that gives you your skills for actually navigating and making your way and then only on top of all of that only after all of that is running do you get the causal interactions that give you your beliefs but if you fixate on beliefs yeah and ideologies which are just systems of beliefs and a political system that is just about one ideology killing another you are cutting yourself this is why I'm metapolitical because it is fixated on the propositional level but if you're fixated on that propositional tyranny and you don't think there you need transformative truths you cut yourself off from the procedural and then below that the the perspectival and below that the part participatory and that's where most of the meaning in life Machinery is running that's why it matters it's really amazing how you gave that analogy almost like the weight of an iceberg and the deepest part of us is the foundation yet we've deified and kind of flipped it on his head we're propositional another form of idealization another form of idolatry that we engage in that what we know is kind of the GU my beliefs my beliefs are ultimate and what really matters and who and everything I am a lot of your behavior are not driven by your beliefs a lot of your behavior is driven by your skills it's driven by your States Of Consciousness it's driven by your traits and habits and deficits of character so would you say there's a distinct correlation and relationship between suffering we experience collectively and individually and the identification with propositional knowledge is kind of the new God yeah that is why I call it propositional tyranny and you see religions for all of their ills were about well before the enlightenment because one of the things the enlightenment did was convince religion that they're belief systems people equate religion with belief systems but what religions were and if you read the literature before the enlightenment it was understood that religion was primarily addressing the noesis and the nosus of us right and inviting us into deep transformation because depths of reality will only be uh be disclosed to us after we undergo deep transformation and so again yes that is why we suffer where do you go to bring about the Deep transformations of the nonpropositional knowing and you know and that's think about that that's what wisdom is knowledge is about what you know wisdom is about how it's about the procedural and the perspectival and the participatory wisdom is about the how and so we're we've lost that as well largely identifying in the top down processing very much very much yeah and not having the e practices that that evoke the bottom up when I meet people I will often say to them don't tell me what you believe tell me what you practice because that is going to give me a lot more information about who you really are your beliefs yeah they matter they're necessary but they're very very far from sufficient I think there is a big shift that one once they start to deepen their practices of meditating in silence or really cultivating the capacity to listen you start to not prioritize what somebody's saying as much as the place it's coming from you can very clearly kind of see that well notice not brilliant bril you you start to shift from what they're saying to how they're saying it the tenor and the tempo and then the place they're coming from that's that perspectival knowing where where is their Viewpoint and then what what's their understanding what are they standing upon what's their participatory knowing you you yes you try to sense behind or through like the way I'm looking through my glasses you try to sense through the proposition into the nonpropositional and you start to get you start to get genuine compassion you start to be able to like I'm not just understanding what they're saying like you said I'm understanding where they're coming from and who they are and what they're saying and I I I'm going to try and make myself open and responsive and responsible to that yes yes that's yes and it because it's like we all want to gen like we want to be connected to what's really real like you're speaking to and when it comes to relationships there is that saying I believe uh decency is the absence of strategy right you know and so in many ways we can see in relationships people are trying to get something instead of having a genuine sincere interaction right they're trying to get something they're trying to have rather than trying to become yeah right and notice we say we have sex but we want to be in love like love like this is another thing we've done we've trivialized love we think that love is a feeling what a ridiculous proposal like love isn't even a single emotion like I love Sara profoundly right now that is making me ache but when I see here it'll make me happy sometimes it makes me angry because that person is threatening Sara love is a existential stance it's a whole way of configuring my agency and how I'm connected to reality that gives a whole living network of emotional responses that's what love is and what that means right is exactly what you're talking about I can't come in trying to have something I have to become someone and I have to I have to a part of what love is is is a willingness to and this requires tremendous vulnerability Greg Enrique's friend of dear friend of mine colleague we're writing a book on Consciousness together he's got this amazing proposal that language language is is a superpower because it allows us to coordinate our Behavior like we're useless as individuals in in biologically like you know a really angry dog can take you out but give us language so we can coordinate our behavior and we get some pointy sticks and then we can train the dogs and then we can kill anything on the planet right so language is really powerful but language makes you so vulnerable langu language discloses you in the way nothing else can bertran Russell famously said no matter how eloquently a dog barks it can't tell you that its parents were poor but hardworking so what we need is we need a way of managing that and what people do is they like you're you're so insightful they they think what they'll do is they'll have a method a strategy here dayart I'll have a universal method a strategy for doing this I won't have to become what I'll do is I'll create this defensive strategy to protect my vulnerability or you can get the recommendation of Jesus of Nazareth which is no what you'll do is I'm going to take take that vulnerability and I'm going to entrust it and I'm going to turn it into an opening so that that person can as as much as possible see through my pretenses that's what Socrates does he he offers also the chance for you to he he said I'm like a mirror and like you look into somebody's eye his eyes and he says he's a midwife helping you to give birth to yourself you know you can you you allow the person to profoundly see and they and if they reciprocate and they allow them and they make them this is called mutually accelerating disclosure it's how you fall in love with somebody if I make myself vulnerable and open myself up so that you can see through and you can see where there's pretense but you can also see where there's hurt but you can also see where I'm coming from better and you reciprocate by opening up and then I see that and and we do that that's love it's erotic love or it's friendship love or it's familial love and then that that that's the alternative those are the nourishing connections you know I think authenticity has gotten a good publicist and marketing agent to where it's now the thing that you you know should do and you know I'm very suspicious of authenticity as a virtue but what you're speaking to in the absence of that strategy of like really sharing being with somebody right is uh that is authentically actually showing up in in U in connection with other people um instead of the the the authenticity that's gotten a good publicist you know yeah yeah yeah yeah where the authenticity is sort of being true to my inner self that is unchanging and permanently who I am it's a thing that's used again yeah yeah yeah what is relevance realization as as it I think I think this flow I think this Flows In actually here because when we're trying to understand the mind and what are prior are and you know uh it's it's important to really understand not just how we're thinking about things like what we're thinking about but the place we're coming from when we're thinking about it and I always enjoy examining inwardly you know where are my own uh self-held dogmas or perspectives that um are keeping me stuck in a less fluid way of living you know and so I think this has immense importance for today's day and age thank you I I laughed because um not I wasn't laughing at you I was laughing at myself because your relevance realization has been sort of the Obsession at the core of my scientific work for what three decades um I've been working on it since before my PhD thesis um so I this will take a couple of steps so I'll need a bit of space if that's okay um so here's a proposal you demonstrate a fantastic ability ability we're trying to give artificial intelligence right now so what are what are people talking about they're talking about artificial general intelligence AGI uh what does that mean well it means previously our AI was siloed the AI could was a single domain single type of Problem Solver but and that was radically unlike you you're a you're a general purpose a general a domain General Problem Solver you can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains in a wide variety of ways which makes you astonishingly adaptive so your adaptivity is that you're a general Problem Solver all right and so the idea is what makes you a general Problem Solver obviously for specific problems you have to have specific knowledge or specific skills but being a general Problem Solver there must be something that's General that's at work and so here's the proposal my theoretical proposal and I'm pleased to say more and more people are finding this plausible and so it's been a long haul for me but um I'm very grateful for the recognition that what makes you generally intelligent is that you solve two meta problems meta problems are any any problem you have to solve in order to solve any specific problem these are basically the The Meta problems the two aspects of adaptivity setus parabis all that's playing equal you want to be an Adaptive Problem Solver does does that make make sense okay so adaptivity being really adaptive in in a comprehensive way okay so what are these two meta problems well and why are they interlocking we already talked about one and this comes out of the astonishing work of Carl friston and Andy Clark and and and work I've I've done and published with Mark Miller and Brad Anderson on predictive processing all that's being equal the more you can anticipate the world the more generally intelligent you are Michael Lan has a Wonder while talking about it he calls this your cognitive light cone and he and I want you to remember this point he talks about it's about what the organism can care about m okay interesting just side note the yeah uh I rewatched The Matrix a few days ago and the the significance of the Oracle and I guess their ability to really anticipate forcoming events uh places them on the top of the hierarchy of society in a way that's right yes side note well no no that's a good note because think about it do you want like like the or do you do do you want to do you want to react to the tiger or avoid the tiger do you want to happen upon where the salmon are or do you want to anticip ipate where the salmon are going to be you see when you anticipate the world the more deeply you can anticipate the world the more adaptive you are that's why you think a a dog is more intelligent than a frog because you know a dog can you can say to a dog go into the next I we're raising a uh a dog right now a frog not a frog you would have surprised me that would not have been my anticipatory knowledge no no it's it's a dog and you can you can say to the dog hey stie uh go into the next room and get your ball and come back you can't do that with a dog with a frog I should say right um and so you you you actually attribute intelligence when you get an intuitive sense of the cognitive light cone of an organism but here's the issue and and it's interlocked see soon as the more I start to anticipate the world the more the more my goal State the my problem solution is in the future because I'm anticipating more I hit the problem of relevance realization this is the amount of information that is available to me now you are generally intelligent so the amount of in just in this room the amount of information you could pay attention to is astronomically vast even think of just the potential combinations you could look at this edge of the glass that spot there that over there and then feel the tip of your nose or you could do your knee the tip of my finger that's spot like it's overwhelming it's combinator explosive right the amount of information you can pay attention to is astronom i al vast the amount of information in your long-term memory and all the possible combinations you could connect you maybe can find some connection between the Nile River and the politics of Uruguay right now I don't know maybe there is and you could somehow do that some way right combinator explosive all the possibilities you can consider all the possible sequence of act actions the number of possible sequence of actions the possible Pathways of actions in a chess game is greater than the number of atomic particles in the universe and that's just a chess game right now here's what you can't do you can't check all that information to see if it's relevant to your problem the it would take you infinity you yeah so you can't check it and see no so and this sounds kind of like a Zen Cohen you're intelligent because you ignore most of that information rapidly and you zero in you home in on what is relevant such that it is Salient to you it becomes perceptually attractive to you right even to the point of being obvious to you what you should be paying attention to what you should be remembering and what possibilities for Action you should be considering and you're doing it right now like that pre-conscious right oh totally in fact it's pre egoic it's it's it's it's ER everything because if you're not doing relevance realization you're not capable of any anticipatory problem solving whatsoever you can't start any learning project you can't form any categories you can't look how I'm going to form a category well there's two glasses oh well how did I do that well I noticed that notice the language I'm us I noticed that they're similar oh what do you mean by similar you mean they're absolutely identical no no no they share some properties Oh you mean uh like the as long as any two anything share any two things share properties a lot of properties they're similar of course that's what I mean by similarity okay a lawnmower and a plum uh they both have curves surfaces they both contain carbon they're both found in North America neither one existed 300 million years ago both weigh more than a paperclip both have a distinctive oder both have a shiny surface neither one is a particularly good weapon how many true things can I say about lawn mower and and a plum so they must be very similar and this is Nelson Goodman's point that I can do that for any two objects logically everything is similar to everything else and and now what people will say well but those don't matter you have to pay yeah exactly you pay attention to the relevant factors of comparison so before I can even categorize I have to do relevance realization so this is obviously immensely important right if life is a certain amount of time and energy how we use our attention in that span of time and energy is what I've I've said before is attention as our spiritual currency that's why why we pay right yeah and so it's like what are the preconscious pre egoic uh drives in which we decide what is important to give our attention to and that is going to drive unbeknown to us in many ways the direction of our life right so that relevance realization framing my my glasses have frames and it excludes a lot of what I can't see right I'm not paying attention to but it also affords me it focuses me and makes things stand out for me as I look through it and it it's transparent to me I I'm typically not aware of my glasses because I'm aware through them of the world that's how I am paying attention and this is really important because there's a lot of really valuable stuff outside of our current frame oh yeah you better believe it so yeah and and you have moments where what part of your general intelligence is you have a self-organizing capacity for correcting when you have misframing when you have focused on the wrong things and ignored the right things so hopefully this will work for people you'll have a situation where you'll say oh oh oh I thought she was angry but she's afraid and everything shifts and your perspective shifts and what you pay attention to shifts and what's foregrounded and background shifts and what's Salient and relevant shifts that's Insight that's Insight Insight is your your your brain's ability to correct when it has misf framed so part of what relevance realization is doing is also always checking to see if it's framing well it has this recursive d di mention to it and that and that is almost also happening outside your conscious awareness so for example can you just do an Insight like you you're in a situation you need an Insight I don't know how to do this I need an Insight well I'm just going to do an Insight right it doesn't work that way right you don't but you also can't just passively wait for an Insight you have to and here's we back to it you have to take up the right perspective because you have to start shifting around what you're noticing and you have to get into the right participatory mode you participate in a perspectival flow that can afford the emergence of an Insight I study how Insight works but your point is we also suffer from the opposite the lack of insight which is foolishness where you don't notice that she's afraid and you double down on that she's angry and you keep interacting with her as if she's angry and you're making the situation worse and worse and worse and you're deceiving yourself about what you are who you are in that situation and about what's going on and so the very processes that make you so radically powerfully intelligently adaptive make you radically prone to pervasive and profound self-deception I think that's part of the first Noble Truth of Buddhism that really frames the uh reality of us either living an ignorant or a wise life right including what is going to be most beneficial to our and others well-being um with the proper framing there is this infinite Warehouse of information and stimulus and signals in our surroundings and I'm curious how you think intuition relates to this because they they seem analogous and and supportive and towards one another in many ways so I mean and there's uh and this is in the book um and um which by the way we mentioned many times but it's Awakening from the meaning crisis book one you and Christopher and we link it down in the description yeah uh about the cognitive Continuum between what's called fluency and insight and flow um and then into mystical experience and Enlightenment but let's talk about intuition um and this is deeply influenced by the work of Arthur Reber and Hogarth in his book educating intuition um so H Hogarth has a very powerful I think I I'm convinced it's highly probable that it's correct uh account of what are the co what's the cognitive process at work in intuition um and he says intuition is a result of what's called implicit learning so Arthur Reber did a bunch of experiments and this has been well replicated so what you do is you come up with an art completely artificial grammar it's just a set of rules for how you can string letters or numbers together like you have to have two vowels um but you cannot have more than one consonant and and you can you can never have two odd numbers I random just random rules and then I create I create letter number strings that follow these this grammar and I generate a whole bunch of these okay and now in the first part of the experiment what I do is I give them to the the participant here's one here's another and they're they're long they're like nine strings so you can't hold them in working memory here's another here's another here's another here's another okay that's the first part now what I've now done is for the second part of the experiment I generate a bunch of new strings half of them come from that same artificial grammar that I used in the first part of the experiment the second half come from a completely different artificial grammar right completely different set of arbitrary rules and so I have a mixture of new strings some that come from the same grammar some that come from an alternative grammar then I give all these new strings to people and I ask them which one of the new strings belongs with the old ones that's it that's their task people score well above chance reliably on this they say that one belongs that one doesn't that one belongs that one doesn't because of our subconscious capacity for pattern recognition well basically and and it's very important because what's going on there I I I hesitate to to I don't mind you using the word subconscious the problem is the notion of Consciousness got the whole thing around implicit learning into an endless debate and so I just say it's not deliberate and explicit learning uh just to Sidetrack all of that um and so uh now if you ask people what they're doing they'll give you one of two answers one is I don't know how I'm doing it you see how so much like intuition already the other is they'll confabulate they'll give you a a method that they claim is using but that method actually doesn't predict their success so they make something up right here's the third thing if I take the same experiment and I make it an explicit task right which is try this is these have been generated by rules try to figure out the rules generating these strings I make I give them the explicit I turn it into an explicit problem performance degrades it gets much worse H now here's the problem okay so you have and I think a lot of so-called psychic phenomena are actually uh very sophisticated implicit learning um I'm excited to ask you more about that okay I'm happy to talk about that um and so um the problem and this is where hogarth's particular genius comes in the problem with predictive processing is its Peril sorry it power which is implicit because it's implicit is also its peril so predictive processing sorry implicit learning I said predictive processing it's a version of predictive processing I'm trying to keep that out of my mind um the implicit learning what it's doing it's right is it's picking up on complex patterns without your reflective awareness okay that's what makes it so powerful that means though that It suffers from these two deficits that make it parous it can't distinguish between kinds of patterns so it can't distinguish correlational patterns from causal patterns it can't distinguish illusionary patterns from real patterns also it can only pick up on presented patterns it can't go looking for patterns that have not yet been presented now those are two significant deficits so that means when you like what implicit learning does when it's been powerful for you you call it your intuition when it throws up something you realize was illus you call it being a racist or being a bigot or being a sexist or being right insensitive or etc etc it's the same process that which makes us adaptive makes us prone to self-deception and so hogar talks about um how do we educate intuition because we can't replace it with explicit learning so what can we explicitly do in order to make intuition better and so I I can go into that at some point if you want but that's that's the answer to what I think intuition is okay well since we're here I want to ask you about psychics okay because there is this one person who I somebody connected me on a call with um she knew nothing other than my first name and she was a hundred on a 100 for many things that she told me I've since like gotten her on a call with a few other friends and she said things that no other human possibly know you can not search up on Google um uh ancestral things uh things that are happening within my own psyche she knows nothing about me how did you record it I did I'd like to hear the recording I could say I would like to S yeah I'll share it with you because when this is typically done what happens is people's because we suffer from reconstructive memory okay so memory is not about accurate recall from the past it's about intelligent prediction of the future okay it's about anticipation so classic example I'll give you a bunch of cards and they have random dot patterns on them I give you a whole bunch of them right and then what I do is I'm going to give you some cards you haven't seen before and I'm going to ask you if you've seen these if they replicate the patterns what I'm going to do is I'm going to take those I'm going to make a pattern you did not see but it represents the mathematical average of all the cards you've seen you know because I what I can do is I can plot them on a grid and yeah that's the one you'll be most confident you saw yeah no I I've totally thought about this and like I've I've in relation to my own I guess desire to believe or not believe but there is maybe I'll just maybe if you're open as an experient to get on a call with her and see what happens then well I I wouldn't I don't have the relevant expertise I want a trained stage Mentalist okay with me because whenever we do these experiments properly we have a stage a trained stage Mentalist they tell us exactly what the person is typically doing okay and then they put in controls and the psychic thing goes away yeah I'm so fascinated it's just very interesting I'm not claiming that all these people are charlatan I think some of that is because they have crafted very powerful implicit learning you actually and I by the way and and we now know this because the llms can take stuff right patterns in our speech and make powerful predictions about our ancestry and our connections you're that data is there but it would be like giving no data to an llm to start with it but how of how long were you talking to her none I said nothing she just Nam my first name and she just started telling you stuff it was pretty listen I'm very skeptical person I don't believe stuff I mean I I I I I don't want to bully your phenomenology or your memory uh all I know is that reliably when this is put into a test situation it it it goes away maybe in between if we do another conversation we'll try to set something up with a mentalist and really try to poke at this because I'm I'm very I'm I'm intrigued by it I'm baffled by it and I'm Al also trying to poke holes in it logically always and your your knowledge of what is available about you is also um uh how did the how did the call get set up for example uh somebody somebody recommended her because they thought that it would be interesting for me and I was like I I mean people ask me that stuff all the time I'm like yeah all right fine she like 100 out of 100 so spot on so she knew nothing other than my first name CU when I've done this with people and I've asked them to record and they they said 100 100 then we went back and listened to the tape and I was able to say well did was that right oh I forgot about that and well we can put this aside maybe we'll explore outside of this pH U I hope you understand that I'm not saying that I think you're false I'm trying to be I'm trying to be agnostic no I actually I'm do I do exactly what you're trying to do with me as well which are just like poke holes into you know um into all this because of what we've been saying I I know our proclivity for confirmation bias and I know our proclivity for relevance realization and for ignoring and for finding Salan and for not remembering um and I also know tremendous capacity uh that people have for implicit learning and picking up on very very complex patterns um there there's been some famous experimental work on so-called psychic abilities that showed that what was actually going on was very powerful implicit learning uh there's you know there was the notion of sheldrick of the feeling of being stared at yeah and you know you would have people come into a room and they you put plugs in their ears and everything and then randomly people would come in and stare at them and the people would report if I'm being stared at or not and people were scoring well above chance and oh wow that's really powerful well then when they try to replicate it's two different things what they did is they they changed one variable in the initial experiment they were giving people feedback they were giving the participants they were saying yeah you got that right there was somebody no you weren't and you well and and you say well that doesn't matter cuz people are being introduced randomly human beings can't Generate random patterns it was actually a very complicated pattern that they were repeating like a sequence of pattern sequence of how they were introducing people in the room and people were picking up implicitly on that pattern and that's and they were making accurate predictions of when somebody was in the room because if if if when you remov the feedback their performance fell to Absolute chance now nobody's doing fraud there do you see what I mean powerful powerful imp learning H what does it mean to increase cognitive agency I think what it would mean is to move through two steps one is to move from intelligence and these aren't ladders you don't leave the one behind right to move from intelligence to rationality intelligence is G your measure of G intelligence is only very weakly predictive only weakly correlated with measures of your general rationality [Music] um and then to move from rationality to wisdom so um rationality doesn't primarily mean being logical even though we use logic as a synonym for rational look if I if I try to make you logical what would you need to do you need to work according to standards of completeness and formality and certainty so I want you to logically investigate all the information in the room you're now doomed right so if you tried to process everything logically you're doomed so that's not what rational means because um you can only be logical after you've done a lot of relevance realization Anna Reddell and I are we got a paper in revision we think it's going to get published soon making this argument a more technical detail for people who want to go into it so what does rational mean well it doesn't mean simply being intelligent so because you can be highly intelligent and fail most of the tests of rationality so it doesn't mean being logical it doesn't mean being smart what does being rational means it means what we've been talking about it means the capacity to reflectively become aware of self-deception and systematically and systemically intervene in it that's what rationality is and you have to do it right not just for each kind not not for just propositional knowing you have to do it for each kind of knowing because you can yourself with how you pay attention that's how advertising works you can Yourself by taking the wrong role I suffer from this especially like when I've gone on like this and I've been in this mode John Veri scientist mode and I go home and Sara has to say John John you're not scientist anymore you it's me SAR get back into the right like take on the right agency take on the right like you we we we right so thing about rationality is I learn I use my intelligence so that I systematically many domains in the world and systemically many levels overcome self-deception but I do that for each of the kind of knowings that's the second stage but now I want to coordinate all of the rationalities so that they don't conflict that they inste instead are coherent and afford each other so I get a rationally self-transcending field of rationalities that long phrase can be replaced with wisdom that's what wisdom is that's what it is to enhance your cognitive gency to to to cultivate rationality beyond your intelligence and wisdom beyond your rationality and there's a state beyond that too I think what's this what is a state beyond that I think it's Enlightenment okay we'll pick back up on enlightenment but what is a simple practical thing somebody can do to increase cognitive agency today for example someone's listening to this practice at least one remember I talked about like an iology of practices practice at least these two things okay you have two things that are in opponent processing opponent processing is they're working together to make you adaptive but they're doing opposite things so one is um you are within a frame and you're very carefully moving step by step through an inferential argument okay MH what we typically call reasoning although that's bit of a mistake okay so let's call that inference to make it clear then you have a different thing which is no no that's entitl the wrong frame I need to break out it we've already talked about that that's Insight now they work differently so if you let your Insight Machinery work inside the inference frame you can get into trouble so here's a pond there's a lily pad on it every day the number of lily pads doubles on day 20 the pond is filled on what day was it half filled with lily pads I mean it's not 10 right but you want to say 10 don't you you want to it's probably yeah so there's a part of you with the compounding effect is I don't know it's probably somewhere it's 19 it's the day before Oh the day before yeah yeah yeah yeah duh see there's yeah right right so it's a day before okay now notice what happens you've got let's call Bob the Insight guy he's trying to jump to a conclusion because that's what Insight is you're jumping right you you're breaking a frame and jumping to a new way right and when you like it it's Insight when you don't like it it's jumping to a conclusion so you need a practice that constrains that Machinery while you're inside inference this is called active open-mindedness you try to look for biases you try to look for jumping and you try and really constrain it but sometimes you need an Insight because what's going wrong isn't the inference what's going wrong is the framing now what you need to do is you need to shut off all of that inferential Machinery you need to shut it off and make that kind of jumping or leaping as it's sometimes called because a an Insight is a cognitive leap you need to make that more available that's a mindfulness practice mindfulness practices are shutting off the inferential Machinery to enhance the Insight but you also need rational ref itive practices active open-mindedness that quiet the Insight Machinery so the inferential machinery and you don't want to maximize either one because both can lead you into trouble you want to be practicing both so they're like an ecology they're constantly acting like a dynamic check and balance on each other yeah that's one example yeah so the practical application of trying to reason your way through something in life and you keep heading a dead end or whatever to slow down and have a mindfulness practice that allows you to create more space to come from a different frame in a way right but don't over rely on your Insight and your intuition when the context requires an appropriate careful step by so like when I'm writing a paper of course I want insight to go into the generation of the framing of it but I want to be very very careful when I'm making my inferential steps when I'm actually doing the scientific argument as it relates to IQ yes so I I mean I feel like people will think something is profound to the degree it touches the upper boundary of their intelligence right and so or would you agree no okay please push back on it because I've actually developed and been publishing a theory of what profundity actually is and so do you want to go through that or yeah maybe profoundness actually isn't the right word um but go ahead so um profundity is um it's part of how we sense that things are real and and real is a comparative real isn't like red real is like tall something is real in compar more real or less real than something else so for example you think the dream is real while you're in it but then you wake up and you move to a bigger frame and from that bigger frame you see the limitations and bias of the dream world and you say that wasn't real by the way that's a metaphor that people use for meaning in life they want to be connected to something something bigger than themselves they don't mean literally bigger they be they want to be in that bigger picture CU that has a greater chance of connecting them to reality okay so what people are doing is they're looking for an increase in intelligibility that means things making more sense yeah is that okay now one of the things we look for is we look for trustworthiness we want many independent lines of Investigation to lead to the same model that's why you will guard even babies do this if the baby only sees something the baby's not sure if it's real because it might be a subjective illusion yes but if the baby can see it and hear it and touch it the baby thinks treats it as real because the chance that each one of those channels is going through the same subjective illusion is much smaller so you de you increase the probability sorry you decrease the probability of subjective Illusion by having many converging things come in so that's why we is like we want independent lines of evidence that lead to something that makes sense for us it's got to be coherent it has to like we talked about coherence it has to not be absurd it has to work it has to fit it has to rule things out and it has to rule things in but that's not enough we also want something that empowers us we want our model to be elegant we want it to go into many different domains and find problems that we hadn't seen before and solve them Einstein's theory of relativity is profound because it's elegant right it goes into all of these domains right and finds things and so it makes all this new sense so we want we want really trustworthy old sense coming into a really coherent informative model that makes a lot of new sense and we want them we want those two to be balanced so if if I'm not projecting very much right promising to explain very much you don't need the model to be particularly deeply trustworthy if I say I like vanilla ice cream you don't go oh but if I say you know I think the English Monarchy are lizards and notice how I can explain so much of their behavior with that you go yeah you can explain a lot of their behavior but that's a really untrustworthy model right this is how conspiracy theor this is one the way we ourselves we we get things that are highly well think about far-fetched they project a lot but they're not trustworthy we also have the opposite we have something that's really trustworthy but it doesn't project very much that's triviality when people are hungry they [Music] eat you don't go that's really profound of course it's trustworthy you don't doubt that yeah of course but it doesn't open up reality but when it's really trustworthy and it's really coherent so when you got you've got convergence you got coherence and you got elegance and you've got them balanced then we find something profound we find it highly plausible where plausible means I take it very seriously yeah fascinating amazing so one of the things you asked me a minute ago one of the things people should be doing is you know we can't control very much the probability of the information we're getting because that involves experimentation and causal interaction with world we have to trust other people about that but what you and I can do is we can do a lot about the plausibility what should we take seriously well ask yourself how many and really check for confirmation bias how many independent lines of evidence and argument have converged on this how coherent how clearly does it is it vague or is it coherent does it rule things out does it rule things in and how elegant how much does does it promise to open up and generate new understanding for me then take it seriously that's some recommendation to give to your listeners practice plausibility more and more and you the more you get better at it the more you will bump into something that's profound that's really important asteris there yeah how much is IQ in your understanding a predictor of success in life versus fulfillment in life is there a correlation oh that's a brilliant question so and I think IQ is largely a measure of anticipatory relevance realization um and therefore I think it is massively predictive of your ability to learn and solve problems if I have to get one measure from you I want G because G is going to tell me how long you're going to live how well you're going to do in your job how well you're going to do in your relationships how well you're going to do in in your educational projects which would be an IQ from some sort of reliable test that people oh yeah yeah yeah not one of the earth hats tests that's on the internet uh uh you know one of the reliable test the ones that's been well you really you're kind of like is that just very predominantly genetic and like you're born with um so it's gby so your IQ although it's not very malleable perhaps longterm meditation altering working memory in your sance landscape can nudge uh uh G bit that's I think that's not it's not a consensus I'm not even convinced but I take it seriously okay uh but that doesn't mean you're just genetically determined this is a misleading way of talking about it because people will usually create a square in their mind and then just divide it in half but it's it's 50% genetics 50% environment and how they interact that actually generates your intelligence but what's more important about you because your intelligence is not in like very malleable very changeable if I had to like what I a better measure I want and you know stanovich has talked about this uh colleague of mine from the University of Toronto what intelligence test mix I want actually measures of your rationality and your wisdom because unlike your intelligence rationality and wisdom are very malleable how do you measure wi wisdom so you can measure rationality and then what you want to do is you want to try and measure all the rationalities and all the different kinds of knowing and relative trade-offs between measures of insight and measures of inference and then you have standard we have a we have validated wisdom scales and they're still all in progress they're they're much better than nothing but they're not at the level of psychometric uh level that we have for G we have some measures of rationality that are approaching the validity like like that are for measures of of G and rationality is ultimately much more important uh measure from you and I think we will eventually get the wisdom measures uh they're already better than nothing they're better than people's just intuitive judgments but hopefully we'll get them up to that level you know that's part of what my work hopefully contributes towards and uh those measures are are very very powerful um uh the measures of rationality are very very powerful for predicting what you asked me above and beyond success well-being yeah because rationality and meaning in life which I think goes where where we're starting to blend into wisdom are much more predictive of well-being or at least emonia or a life well- lived than you're in measures of intelligence what have you learned from the Buddhist uh understanding and psychology for the cultivation of wisdom in one one's life uh what is like a predominant overarching theme that you see there the all of what I said to you about the centrality importance of nonpropositional knowing and the needing the need to bring about an eight-spoked wheel and ay of practices that can transform the nonpropositional in order to fundamentally alter my connectedness to real and see through illusion and self-deception all of that was well it was orig inspired by Socrates and Plato but it was educated through Buddhism but then I came back to find the neoplatonic tradition and I've got it further educated within the Western uh philosophical tradition you mentioned pointing to something beyond what we were speaking to earlier about Enlightenment yes what is Enlightenment in your understanding so it's I argue Chris and I argue on the on this in the book and I've got a new paper coming out with Hussein and Daniel called flowing into mystical experience that there's a cognitive Continuum so you have a domain generalistic that you use for so let let me called fluency um I give you a text and it's got standard white uh you know white print and a back uh sorry black Print and a white background I give you the exact same text but it's now red orange okay so the second one's more difficult to read the content the propositional content is exactly the same you have to manipulate this so people aren't like just directly comparing them beside each other but I I I ask you which one's more likely to be true you tell me the one that was black and white rather than one that was red and orange you find the one that was black and white more beautiful you make judgments of Truth goodness and Beauty according to how fluently you process the information so this is called a domain generalistic because it's not based on what you're processing it's based on how you're processing now what do we think what what sorry what do I think is going on because there's controversy over what is fluency what we argue in the paper and more and more people I think are coming around to see this is because they used to think it was ease of processing was just how easy things are processed you judge them you judge them as more real that's not right because I can make something very easy for you to process merely by repeating it merely by repeating it merely by repeating it merely by and you're not going oh profound truth you're going this is stupid right so it's not ease of processing it's much more like this it's much more like the relevance realization that is taking a complex messy IL defined world and framing it so that you have a clear well-defined problem that you can work with right so that's called optimal gripping right so fluency is measuring the degree to which you're optimal gripping and your brain is using that as a measure for how real the information is it's a heuristic which means the not free lunch theorem it's bound to go wrong but it's an actual it's a really good heuristic like all your other adaptive tics it's a really good rule of thumb to use now toal Linsky and Reber when you have an Insight you actually have a spike in fluency you have a sudden increase in how fluent your processing is and that gives you this moment of like this super salience and this Flash and you feel more deeply connected y now what if you took a bunch of insights and you you you strung them together so one Insight is priming another so that you're doing something like rock climbing and you you have to continually nonpropositional restructure how you're looking at things and you're embodiment and so you go through one you almost imp past but then you get an Insight you and then you go to another and you go to another you go to another and what's happening is those insights are priming each other you get an Insight Cascade and you're getting an extended aha experience and the world feels super Salient and it feels like Discovery and you feel deeply at one and you're focused and your your egocentric uh narrative is dropping away because you're so religio you're so coupled to the world that's the Flow State MH one of the things happening in the Flow State remember when I talked about implicit learning and it can go wrong yeah well what did Hogarth recommend you do to to improve implicit learning well he said you want to set up the explicitly set up the context in which you're doing the implicit learning in order to help you track causal patterns rather than correlational patterns well how you do that well we know how to do that that's exactly what an experiment is an experiment is you set up the environment so you can cleanly distinguish causal patterns from correlational pattern patterns what do you need in an experiment you need clear information things can't be vague you need tightly coupled when I manipulate something there has to be a tightly coupled response and failure matters you have to be able to say hey your hypothesis wasn't confirmed okay so clear information tightly coupled failure matters what are the conditions chick semahi said need to to be the case in information processing in order for you to get into the Flow State you need clear information and it has to be tightly coupled and failure has to matter do you see what flow is it's not only an Insight Cascade it's right when your brain's going oh that's good lots of insight it's also you're doing you're cultivating intuitions that are picking up on complex patterns that are also real and your brain's going do more of that do more of both of those more more and more that's why flow is a universal across cultures gender socioeconomic status language groups people describe flow in detail with near synonimous terms and flow is optimal for people they regard it as some of the most powerful experiences of their life and it's their Optimal Performance right that's because it has a high profound functionality and it's one of those two exper few maybe two or three experiences where our reduction in our egocentric narrative self is experience positively because we're actually getting enhanced meaning in life enhanced religio that's why if I want to know how much meaning in life you have one of the things I'll ask you is how frequently do you get into the Flow State and that's quantity quality are you flowing in an environment that's largely real right now what if flow is dependent on your skills right the demands have to just exceed your skills like you need a degree of unconscious competency to be able totally yeah now you can get domain specific skills skills that fit a particular domain like I'm commercial artist right and so sitting at the piano and you understanding your skills that's deep in your body you flow exactly exactly but you have domain General skills you have domain General skills you have skills of general intelligence of orientation of religio of connectedness does that make sense what if you we're flowing in those yeah that sounds epic and Stephen Bater has argued and and I've got the great pleasure to meet Steve and have dinner with him that in uh his book on awakening uh so alone with others an existential approach to Buddhism he thought that's what the Buddha had he had this General Flow State rather than a domain specific Flow State that's not all the enlightenment is but okay but yeah but it does make perfect sense when you when you hear the term Enlightenment and your Rel as you are to the saliency of experience where things are flowing yeah you get this even more profound sense of at one this sense of being deeply coupled you get a massive reduction of egocentrism you get a massive presencing of reality cism yeah like the reduction in dmn what did you say in the default mode network of like oh uh well you have not want to go there well yeah yes and no it's more complicated because you're actually doing opponent processing you're doing relevance ization and intelligence but that's not enough that's a mystical experience okay but that's not enough for enlightenment right okay so we we'll continue here but I just think it's it's everybody can relate to this uh moment in their life where they had a deep felt connection of everything around them and a lack of of overly focusing on S exactly Andre the reason why we talk about the Continuum is you have fluency every moment you've had insights you can the flow experience is a universal experience and then if you see that mystical experience is just on that the same Machinery then we're removing the Mystique not the challenge but removing the Mystique around the mystical experience and this is important 40% of the population by most estimates has anomalous experiences Visionary experiences mystical experience one of the problems of the of the meaning crisis is they don't have a framework to integrate those experiences there's a lot I want to unpack there but it sounds like enlightenment is this like to the degree you have become enlightened is to the degree in which you've created a continuity of this flow within your life uh and like maintaining it moment to moment you reference these experiences that people have like one that you had of the platonic solids right you mentioned earlier which is we don't have the right frame I'm curious to what degree mental institutions are filled with people that have accessed as like if there's a percentage of people in there that have accessed a state or experience that's a good question um that's a very good question and there's a lot of of overlap in the phenomenology between psychotic experiences Visionary experiences psychedelic experiences and mystical experiences they're not the same um and but they overlap in ways um um sense of presence um uh Anderson day's book on presence uh this is not we now realize this is pervasive and it gets a little bit freaky and it could this is a a sense presence um I had one of one of these when I was in deep meditation this can happen to people in deep meditation I was all alone and I was in the house I was in a closed room and I heard my name shouted as if it clear as a bell there's nobody around things like that can happen John Gyer reports this really interesting thing people were doing rock climbing and U I don't not rock climbing sorry something much more challenging ice climbing um and the two of them and they fell off and one of them unfortunately died and the other one he's he's he like he was he was deeply he went into shock and so he's laying there sort of considering that he's going to die and he got a sensed presence came up to him he didn't see anything and it spoke to him and it said your nose is bleeding and he said so what and he said well get the sense presence said get up because your nose is bleeding there's snow on the ground you can let the the blood drip on the ground and then you won't walk in circles and that's how you can find your way out that's how he found his way out who now you get really powerful things that are see how that borders on the V Visionary you also get really weird ones where people just say I have this weird sense of something just behind my left shoulder or just behind my right shoulder weird sense people get voices people say there's a voice there's a voice speaking to me but it doesn't say anything like this is the this is weird gam are these all aspects of our own being or do you think there's actually any existential reality to being non-embodied beings so communicating with them well well I don't think they're ontologically autonomous but okay I don't think they're merely subjective um so okay so somewhere in between well that that in between really matters yeah no yeah for sure that's what I'm saying somewhere in between the religio relevance relevance isn't objective is is that relevant in and of itself no is relevance merely objective no cuz you can be wrong about it relevance is there's a Greek word for it mataku Socrates described himself as mataku human beings are between the animals and the gods right matu relevance is between beneath and binds the subjective and objective together so that truth is possible so what we can do you know you know how you you have a body image right and you you don't actually you you do a lot of processing through the body image not through directly interacting with every little aspect of your body it's a it's a very powerful internal image your body makes use of well you probably also have a mind image you can there's a term called EXA xapt is when you repurpose something like the tongue has been repurposed for speech it didn't originally evolve for speech all lots of organisms have tongue but they don't and you are constantly exting you take your sensory motor pattern and you EXA them into moving through abstract conceptual space ideas are far from each other close from each other one is under another and supports another you use all this language we're constantly exalting and what we can do is we can exalt the body image right and we can and the body image is it's it's transc of in nature it's it's not about our physical body it's about our lived body it's about how our body is connected to the environment because it's about our B embodied agency we we also have I think and this is what Anders day seems to be arguing we also have a mind image that's not about our mind but about how our mind is connected and we can EXA that mind image and especially under situations of duress and we can make it give it an independent perspective so that it can break us out of the our it can help us break a frame we're locked into just like you can play with the body image when you're doing taii Chan yeah did did that yeah I mean it brings up a lot of questions that I want to probe further around the nature of Consciousness the possibility of idealism all these things but we did mention there is an aspect of Enlightenment that we haven't gotten to yet that I want to make space for okay so first of all uh like I said 40% a lot of people have the have mystical experiences and they just can't integrate them or they dismiss them so having a mystical experience isn't enough um and so it has to be a trans it first has to be appropriated it has to be internalized as a transformative experience you're going to bring about you know I talked about this earlier a systematic change in who you are so that you get a systemic reconnection to reality that you now that's still not enough because I think that state that state of nosus that transformative connectedness that's disclosing deep truths has to be in service of addressing The Perennial problems that beset Humanity doesn't it inherently do so by the liberation of your own being now that's a really good question and I don't know if can we answer I mean in one sense the track record seems to be pretty good about enlightened beings but we don't know about all the enlightened beings sorry I don't I'm I'm speaking in the way I shouldn't be speaking given the argument I'm making are there enlightened beings that Dain to not do anything about it and then we have a selective bias we would only know about the ones that went around trying to help it trying to help other people yeah I suppose you need to make some sort of metaphysical claims about the nature of Consciousness liberated in one being and if that has sort of value to others outside of but I think I think at least practically we should say we should stipulate that what we we reverse engineer it and say we're not going to call it Enlightenment unless that transformative state is disposed to systematically alleviating suffering reducing self-deception and increasing religio for people on a comprehensive and reliable basis that's what I think Enlightenment is and I think you can regularly see that in the Buddha you can see it in Jesus of Nazareth you can see it in Socrates what do you think about I mean again this can be this can fall into the dangerous territory of trying to top down process and propositionally know um and Cally split the developmental process of of Awakening but I'm curious what if you're familiar at all and think there's any validity to things like Spiral Dynamics or Ken Wilbur's map of Consciousness in terms of kind of mapping colors to degrees of Consciousness and perspectives on life I'm just curious is there any way to measure and if it's useful our own degree of unenlightenment and Enlightenment so I talked to Ken once and he sent me a copy of of his book with a really wonderful note about he really likes my work a lot um and uh I have several of his books and they're i' I've had groups of people from the integral Community who form study groups and followed Awakening for the meeting crisis so I want to be very respectful um but I haven't had an opportunity to study this in depth yeah um um uh you know I i' I've I've read some transpersonal psychology but I was much more in interested in the work of people like Michael wasburn and that had um a much more um dynamical system approach uh whereas Wilbur tends to have a structural list orientation um so I I I I want to just say I um I have a sense that there's something there because of the interactions I've had but I'm not in the place to make a good I I don't have any relev I don't have enough knowledge to make yeah a judgment that I would want to pronounce another interest another folk I'm interested if you've connected with do you know Charles eisenstein have you chatted with him at all no love the name sounds Vaguely Familiar though one book he wrote which is um a more beautiful world our hearts know as possible um but he's an he's an incredible thinker and I'm just curious and with the understanding of the context of this whole conversation what does a world what is a vision of a future of the world post demeaning crisis where we've kind of birthed the next version of this Paradigm uh like what does that look like to you you know having you you realize you've opened up a can of worms because this is the big project I'm working on now so I made a mistake in the series um first of all the series was presented monologic and we actually operate better diolog than monologic and secondly I came away with that with this proposal of the religion that's not a religion and very much a top down you know I'm going to engineer what anology practices and all that sort of thing now there's been some benefit to that mistaken framing we we have an online uh like a website like a platform you can go called awaken to meeting uh uh run by my very good friend Taylor Barrett where there's an ecology practices mindfulness reflection imaginal practices all the stuff we've been talking about and organized in an ecology biological practices um so I'm happy about that but this idea of a religion that's not a religion is actually I think fundamentally a mistaken way of doing it it's this it's top down mhm and you can't top down an Insight it's sorry just doesn't work but what happened with because of the meeting crisis is I got connected to all these communities all these emerging communities in which people and I don't mean the weird messed up culty yeah yeah I mean the healthy ones yeah where there are and I get to meet a lot of them like Rafe the this the work that my good friend Rafe Kelly does um and others and Bonita Roy and others I've seen all these emerging communities of practices and it occurred to me and and more and more and the word that Thomas steininger is doing and I I could name so many and so and when you meet these people you just get a profound sense of something is happening something is being born through them and their work and their Community I call it the Advent of the sacred I think the response to the meaning crisis is that you that the meaning crisis is like a grand civilization level of frame breing and what's happening is like an like a like a civilizational Insight is beginning to take shape and we have to properly Orient to afford it and help it encourage and caress it and cultivate it to take shape Advent of the Sacred and so my next big project is called the philosoph iCal Silk Road in which what what I'm going to do is I'm trying to create a new genre me and a whole bunch of people is I'm going to go to various PL I it's it's inspired by the Silk Road in which there was a move a a trans civilizational transformational movement of ideas I'm I'm I'm no I'm no romantic I know the Silk Road was also branched in Blood and capitalism and thievery but it also did this other thing that's why I call it the philosophical Silk Road right it created a lingua philosophica a shared language so that these different worldviews the different religions and philosophies could deeply and mutually transform each other you know I think we're having one right now when you get into one of these conversation that takes on a life of its own well we could afford that between traditions we could have not only a Col of practices we could have a vibrant acology of tradition so I want to travel I want to travel through all of the neopol neop the neoplatonism of because Arthur vs is right neoplatonism is the spiritual backbone of the West it's it's the mysticism in Christianity in Sufism in Judaism it's it goes into the Renaissance it goes into the scientific revolutions both the one around the Enlightenment and the one around the time of Einstein so it has this massive capacity and I want to travel and go to all these places right and and actually try to give people like the the geography and and and the culture and the atmosphere and try to presence the sage so people can like Nicholas ofua or Meister eart right or go to Alexandra talk about St Clement right and and then and then I want to Zen Zen is the another grand unified field Theory you know from the East the Kyoto School of Nida and the shatani and and dojan and and and coming from the East and then there's you know go to India and you know naruna and sankura from the vidanta and and go into Samaran and talk about surari right go to all these places a and undergo make myself a vulnerable vehicle through which the Advent of the Sacred could potentially you know hopefully maybe I could contribute to giving birth to that linga philosophica and then below that level of that that documentary film there's going to be a 20 episode lecture series like Awakening from the meeting crisis but it's going to be filmed before a live audience of graduate level students and then below that for people who want to dig down there'll be individual video essays with much more technical argument and below that we have people working right now on what's we call the codec they're basically making a Wikipedia of all the terms and all the languages and all the references and it's at four levels of accessibility from grade 10 on it's got cross referencing and pictures and practices you can engage in to understand any of the terms and there's going to be all four of these levels presented for people and they can move up and down the levels as well as back and forth between the narrative story and the lecture series that is my attempt to afford the lingua philosophica that will bring about the Ecology of traditions will bring about this this meta conversation this meta dialogos so that we can more properly make ourselves or oriented to afford and apprehend and appreciate the Advent of the Sacred wow W I'm excited man that's epic I can't wait to see it and take part support how I can and that just seems like an amend service if people are interested and and we we I'll send you the link we have the a website up about the philosophical Silk Road um we are doing fundraising for it right now and uh I don't want to get into uh you know asking for money but uh we are in that so you know if people are are interested in that um that's what we're doing right now and we do we already had a lot of people very much interested committing I it looks like we're going to be able to raise the funds but you never know so you always ask for more until you get what you need right so uh very excited about this project I I have to tell you Andre this is not calling it a project is a mistake yeah I I am called to this deeply deeply called I call it a pilgrimage I'm going to go out because look most of this is not going to be carried by the propositions it's going to be carried by the nonpropositional how I undergo it Chris is going to be there along the way acting like a father Confessor and talking to me right and I'm going to be talking to people and there's going to be music and animation and we're going to try to just it's it's a pilgrimage it's a pilgrimage so it's called Walking the philosophical Silk Road amazing we'll leave links for that I'm I'm so curious but people can check that out in the descript description below and it's a it's an exciting time to be alive with people um and hopefully you can like really receive this you know where your life's work has up to this point like you've culminated to this the amount of knowledge connections insight to truly create some things in the world that have uh that meaningfully have the capacity to to evolve Consciousness and um make a real true and changing impact on people's lives so I'm just I'm I'm honored man and I'm glad that yeah I'm glad to know you're doing that work thank you very exciting thank you so I can't tell you what the world will look like because it's not my place to do so I'm trying my best to make that advent H it um last couple things as we've been going for a while here and this has been incredible like I love this conversation so much and hopefully to be continued um I'm just curious from like a bit the macro perspective we can observe both constructive and deconstructive patterns in terms of human evolution and like what is the relationship you seeing between human suffering and a larger evolutionary process because do you mean like is there a theological reason for this suffer no I suppose what is the necessity of any organism if you want to look at the planet at large like one giving birth which is usually a messy process and how like to the extreme how do we know I guess to to where the extreme is in that process is it inevitable to obviously have a degree of struggle and what is new to be emerged oh excellent so yeah I'm glad you refined your question I think your question is excellent um um just got a paper published uh Johannes joerger uh Anna Rell student co-author of mine Alex J former student of Mine Dennis my colleague at U and my myself the relevance realization can't be rendered um uh can't be captured computationally can't be captured in a formal system um there's a long technical argument people can read the paper if they want or if you want me to go into it but right now the point is relevance realization is always going to be messy um here we'll do something intuitive the your the way we talked about attention I you have a opponent processing I mentioned it earlier you have the default mode Network that is trying to make your mind wander right and then you have the task Focus Network that is trying to keep you focused on tasks and it's right and they're and they're they're pulling you in different directions what does the default mode Network do like Evolution darwinian Evolution it introduces variation and then what does the task Focus Network like natural selection selective attention it kills off most of those variations but it keeps a couple of them and therefore the way your your your that sensory motor Loop reproduces itself evolves so your attention is constantly evolving its fitted does that make sense so so it's so you have relevance realization is like biological evolution and what it gives you is something deeply analogous to biological adaptivity okay there is no final form of life there is no final form of relevance there is no Perfection it's impossible it doesn't make any sense now I have a suspicion I'll make an argument but I I want everybody to remember the tentativeness by which I'm talking about the Advent of the Sacred please ask for that so in that Spirit of that I think what we need to understand is a new sense of the Sacred we've tended to think and this is where I'm critical of Plato who I would love deeply right we tended to think of the sacred as that which is perfect complete final and brings about rest that isn't going to work there's an alternative notion so one way of thinking about sacred that many people have talked about is there's this sacred is what is most real most orienting and most transformative for us it is that which most enhances our religio and most helps us overcome self-deception and you're nodding because that like yeah yeah that lines up with a right right so what is sacredness well what is real remember real is comparative more intelligibility so something why is why do we use a shadow as a metaphor for not real or the Matrix right and the stick is real and the shadow is not real because I can use the stick to understand the shadow but I can't use the shadow to understand the stick and there's lots more information to be found in the stick not there's nothing in it's absolutely shallow the shadow yet reality this is from the philosopher pan really captured well in a really excellent book by Esther like C me called contact with reality realness is right it's an reality is an inexhaustible Fountain of intelligibility that is constantly calling us to innovate constantly calling us to Insight and so what and then we have this never neverend relevance realization that is constantly evolving and right and can constantly evolve because reality is constantly giving us more and more and more real the possibility of more and more realness the sacred is an inexhaustible Fountain of intelligibility that can constantly afford our cultivation of wisdom that's great and evolving ever so into Infinity right and there's an that and for people who might be a little bit irked by that like within Eastern Orthodox Christianity deeply influenced by neoplatonism and neoplatonism as opposed to classical platonism there was a notion I think it was Nicholas uh not Nicholas sorry Gregory of Nissa uh epic tasis was the idea that um heaven isn't like the the beautific vision or heaven isn't you go to a place and you look at God in rest what you're doing is you God provide God is a constant field of that affords you to continually self- transcend so that you more and more forever see things more and more the way God does it's an unending process of continually continual growth in in wisdom which is so there's an ancient hair there's at least one tradition that saw sacredness that way not as Perfection not as completeness not as rest not as static but it's inherently vibrant living and dynamic and filled therefore inexorably with the messiness of life and relevance realization so in order to remove suffering that which makes you intelligently adapt makes you prone to self-deception if I had to make you permanently incapable of self-deception I would have to throttle your adaptivity I would have to kill you that is the only way to make you perpetually free forever from self-deception well well please don't do that no no I don't want to no I know I'm I'm playing with you um man there is there's it's it really is an honor and pleasure to be speaking with you because there's so many areas in which I can explore where there will be meaningful dialogue across the board and there is a lot more that I'm looking forward to potentially in a second conversation hey if you want me back I'll come back okay sweet yeah I would love that um let's have a little bit I mean this whole conversation's been fun but I have a couple like rapid fire things that I'm it might be painful for you to try to be as concise as I'm I will I will be as concise as I possibly can on the the understanding that that's the context in which I'm stating things yes amazing Okay cool so you've of course studied many Incredible Minds throughout history and so the first kind of endeavor I want to try to take you through is I'm going to say a name and you tell me the most important message that you've learned from them I'll try okay that's all I ask okay uh all right well let's start with Plato identify with your finite Transcendence Marcus vus it is possible to be happy even in a palace we got to unpack these more at another point but that's I love it um haiger being is not any particular thing or kind of being William James relevance matters as much as truth Carl Young there is a one within you that can open you up to the one without H Freud you are prone to profound self-deception [Music] Aristotle the world can be made sense of scientifically Spinosa I'm teaching a course right now on Einstein and Spinoza's God all the cartisian dichotomies can be overcome and you can find a new way of understanding God in Ultimate Reality m H John Veri John ver what have I most learned from John Veri uh what I've most learned from John Veri is John Veri is capable of very massive amounts of self-deception um but he does have a spark within him I'm going to scratch that right but don't forget what I just said it's all there I'm going to say what my dear and beloved friend Christopher Master Petro said about me he said John RI is the person the person he knows who most relentlessly and reliably tries to self transcend I aspire to keep that true thank you for pulling pulling that one because it's important to see see oursel often how others see us too you know yeah so much amazing things to unpack there um I have some rapid fire questions again to try to be as concise as possible and then we'll close out okay all right what are three books you think everyone should read before they die uh the Republic the Gospel of John and Spinoza's ethics what's a common self-help idea about meaning or purpose that's actually making people more lost thinking that everything is a about purpose h so tempted to unpack these more I'm restraining myself um if you get instantly download one skill into your brain Matrix style what would it be to have that comprehensive Flow State that I think the Buddha had Enlightenment well at least the Flow State yeah that yeah yeah what's one strongly held belief that you had 10 years ago that you no longer do that there wasn't a God I don't believe in the theistic notion of God but I also reject the atheistic rejection of God cool well we'll unpack that nontheism more I suppose than I'd love to I've enjoyed this conversation if you want to have me back I'll come back of course from the perspective of our descendants in a 25th Century civilization what is the primary observation they would make about our current stage of development we're in a chyos we're in a turning point and chyos is are when the system is most unstable that's very negative but it's also where individual actions can make the most difference we're in a chyos what is the most meaningful realization that our civilization would have to integrate to make it through that turning point we have to recover a lived a livable relationship with the sacred what's a question you wish people would ask you more often what makes me happy what does make you happy when I'm in theal Loos and it takes on a life of its own and I have a sense that reality within and without are disclosing themselves to me and the other person so that we're both getting to a place we couldn't get to on our own I share that with you my friend and I feel we successfully did so in this conversation I agree totally my friend I agree was psychedelic in some way you know when you when you really fall into that flow you know Fully Alive and just super appreciative um in closing what's the most beautiful pattern you you've recognized studying any ancient wisdom Traditions about life and reality beautiful pattern I think the one I talked about earlier and when it when you say it it can sound trivial but that when we truly open up in that transformative way I've discussed we find that reality is already ahead of us opening up to us John thank you so much it's been a great pleasure great great pleasure everybody I highly recommend checking out the book there's also obviously the pre-existing YouTube series but Awakening from the meaning crisis the book the book goes Way Beyond the series amazing incredible work we'll leave links for this down in the description below everybody let us know in what ways this is uniquely meaningful to you I'm really I want to know in which ways this actually impacts your life and matters to you and um how it changes the way in which you move through the world uh again John is there any last closing thoughts or anything you want to share before we head out like I said uh please uh buy the book and uh keep your eyes open everyone for the philosophical Silk Road amazing incredible everybody thank you until next time be well take care [Music]