welcome to voices with raviki i'm very excited about today today is uh uh the fourth in a series that uh i'm doing with zevi slavin from seekers of unity uh and i've got uh one of the great pleasures of this has been getting to know zevi and uh he would swim around in the in in his thoughts and his thinking it's just been it's just been really wonderful and we have uh we've been going back and forth we did uh the the round one on his channel uh seekers of unity and i'll put links to all of that in this video then we did round two on voices with reiki here that we've done round three back on his channel and then this is round four um and this will be the completion of it but uh since the there's agreement i can now also advertise that uh zevi and myself and guy sandstock are going to also do a series uh about the relationship between mystical experience um idea logos and the voice of reason or the call of reason um and we're gonna a pivotal figure around that is to be the work of martin buber but of course there'll be related figures no doubt coming in like spinoza he's always there lurking um and so i'm very excited that's gonna we're gonna start uh uh filming that recording i don't know what the verb is very soon so all of that preliminary aside zevi it's great to have you here again and i'm really looking forward to our conversation today it's a pleasure john to be back it's really really a pleasure and it's been so it's been so great to be on just encountering your thought and your thinking in your series which has been totally mind-shattering also the community surrounding you and the thinkers that you've managed to pull into your gravitational wave has been really excellent i just i actually just got off talking about guys just got off with talking we spoke for two hours today um and i'm still very much tingling with excitement from that conversation and the things which are which are being thrown up from those is really is really great and this this sort of inter-conversational dialogic which is happening between thinkers in this space is really is really very fun so thank you so much for having uh schlep me into this to this dialogue oh you you are you are most welcome to being here and i i'm glad to hear that you're finding it a home because i think you belong here and so uh you're uh you are enlivening this community uh very much with your presence thank you so um i'll just review where we're at i won't review all three episodes because like that'll be enough that would take us to the episode i want to just uh what we've been doing uh what we did in the last is uh zevi basically asked me to present my argument for i mean all of this will be contentious both in terms of whether it's true and what it means but basically the argument but the rationality of mystical experience especially a particular kind of mystical experience that i'm interested in which are what what are called higher states of consciousness that tend to bring about transform deep transformative uh uh experience within individuals they transform their identities their lives so what can we say about this from the standpoint of cognitive science um and again uh i want to reiterate that i i want that what's cardinal science says to enter into a dialogue with what other people from other kinds of traditions have to say about mystical experience i'm not trying to monopolize the discourse around this at all but i do think that what i have to say about this is enriching and can feed back in so there was sort of two moves that needed to be made and we got through most of the first and we sort of set up for the second so just to review quickly what was the first there's an account needs to be descriptively adequate we need to give an account uh first of all we've got to make sure we get the phenomenological description of these higher states of consciousness i said last time and i'll repeat it again i'm not claiming that all mystical experiences are higher states of consciousness i'm talking about a particular kind of mystical experience and for which you know i have quite a bit of empirical evidence and uh psychological and cognitive scientific theory and we know about how that it is predictive of people transforming their lives so i'm very interested in this because it overlaps with my concern with wisdom my main concern is where and how does mystical experience overlap with the cultivation of wisdom so again i'm not claiming this exhaustive i'm but i claiming it's important these higher states of consciousness and so first of all what's the phenomenological description and then what would descriptive atticus would be could we explain those phenomena right those phenomenological characteristics in terms of very well understood cognitive processes and we made that argument around things like insight and flow and decentering and and things like that so we basically made and and zebby was uh you know excellent as um you know uh as a skeptical and also supportive interlocutor and he did this wonderful dance between them which uh well i think that was exemplary so i'm i'm going to take it uh that that this the case for the descriptive adequacy has been made plausible um and then what i want to do is move into uh the prescript prescriptive adequacy prescriptive adequacy is not to say yes it's genuinely the case that these experiences occur and we can explain how they occur this is a different thing that's that's descriptive adequacy prescriptive adequacy is yet yeah but should people pursue them that's a different thing is it justifiable to pursue them is it something that you would rationally recommend to another human being to do that's the prescriptive adequacy and so i want to make an argument that um that we can actually make a good prescriptive case for why people should and i want to qualify it later under the right context in the right way etc but right now just more boldly that people should pursue uh seeking out these kinds of experiences uh if you'll allow me this and this is a gesture towards my friend i'm gonna prescribe that people should be seekers of unity and uh what that and why that is a justifiable a rationally justifiable uh recommendation and so that's basically what i want i'm gonna presume that the case for descriptive adequacy has been met and today i'm going to try with zevi's you know critical interaction to make the case for the prescriptive adequacy of these experiences and then how what this has to say about wisdom and what does it have to say about the connection to reason etc how does that sound sepic yeah i think that's a great summary and i think that's a very important case to make because i think that we're beginning to see a renaissance and resurgence in the importance of mysticism as a topic in popular culture but i think a lot of the the thinking and the legwork to actually make a plausible case for it um in a in a prescriptive way as you're saying i think i think a lot of the work that we did last time was was very helpful but maybe in a place where people are already uh willing to accept but where we're going now is actually quite a bit further which is saying that we all accept that it happens we can even understand how it happens scientifically here is the case why you should do this and that's and that's a or or at least the plausible case to do that yeah um yeah and i and i and i'd like to i'd like to try and aim and in in our interlocution to aim it as to aim it towards an intelligent well-read random person off the street yeah um so we're not presupposing any metaphysics we're not presupposing any religious conviction we're not presupposing anything um just that you're intelligent curious skeptical and that's and we're preaching at you if that's if that's if you fit a description yeah i totally agree with that the one presumption i'm going to make is that the case for descriptive adequacy has been made yes because that video is there it's publicly available there'll be links to that because i can't repeat all of that yes it just won't we won't get it we won't get it underway okay so i'm gonna this is the the argument for plausible uh plausibly justified uh prescription or plausible prescription and so i'm going to start first not talking about mystical experiences i want to talk first about the notion of plausibility um and why i'm invoking it and why it is justifiable to invoke it so first of all i want to get clear about how really important plausibility is and i'm going to take something that most people would find very far from mystical experience and transformation and show you how much it depends on possibility namely scientific experimentation okay so of most contemporary thinking and critical functioning yep so there's a problem that you face if you're going to be a scientist and this is a well-established thing there's lots of existing argument out here i'll just give it an intuitive we always working with finite data sets that of course is again i think non-controversial in science and the point going back to reichenbach is with any finite data set there's an indefinitely large number of equally logically good theories for explaining that and this is of course one of the problems uh it's called the under determination problem um again that's non-controversial and so what many people talk about um is well wow you just gather more evidence but all that does is just shift to a new finite data set with a new set of right and it actually uh kicks the can down the road for the issue which you have to address which is you can't test all of these theories you can a combinatorial explosive and for those of you who have been following some of the other things this has to do this is yet another instance of the you know the indispensability of relevance realization so how do people do this lots of consensus around the idea that scientists do something like inference to the best explanation they grasp the they take a hold of sort of the best and we'll come back to them a sec the best theories that compete to explain the data and then they put sort of tests on them for elegance and fruitfulness and clarity etc and they do inference to the best explanation now the problem there is how do we select those theories if they all logically equally explain the data well what generally goes in there are judgments of plausibility now let's be clear about what we mean by plausibility there's two meanings of plausibility and we can confuse them and then that will cause equivocation one meaning which i think people sort of think although like i said they're often confused about these one meaning is plausible is just a synonym for highly probable and probability is something that you establish right you establish it either prior in mathematics or you exp you establish it uh empirically that's not the meaning i make here because that would require us already uh finding out the probability of our claims and that's what we do with science with scientific experimentation so that's not the meaning of plausibility i mean the other meaning which by the way has a long-standing traditions been studied by people going back to russia wrestler and things like that is where plausibility is a synonym for these things it's reasonable it makes good sense it should be taken seriously it's worthy of our attention right and so notice that that's exactly those are exactly the questions facing the person who wants to decide which theories they're going to put into competition when they go into their experiment and so what they what they have to do is they have to make plausibility judgments what are the reasons the most reasonable theories what are the ones i should take seriously uh what are the ones right that make good sense uh etc so you have to make a plausibility judgment when when you select what are the theories that you're going to put into your inference to the best explanation now you're running your experiment okay so now you're going to run your experiment what's the problem with running the experiment well it's kind of a species of something we i've already said but it repeats itself right so when i'm running an experiment the problem i'm trying to determine if there's a relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable the problem i have in an experiment is that there's always what are called potential confounds right there might be an alternative explanation for the effect that is different from my proposed independent variable so you have to do what's called controlling for the confounds you have to structure your experiment to rule out uh those alternative explanations if you don't your results are inherently confounded which means they're deeply ambiguous you you cannot derive any clear um uh uh conclusion from them so what what do what do we do well why is that a problem well here's the problem the alternative explanations again in number are right like so you're trying to see uh you know like you know does water dissolve no that's water the salt dissolve in water well of course it does and then you go to somebody says no it doesn't and you go to pour in the salt and just as they're pouring in they spray the salt with plastic so it doesn't dissolve they go aha salt does not dissolve in water you go no no i mean i don't mean salt that ha that has just recently been covered uh with plastic and they go okay do it again and they go and then just as you're about to put they flash freeze it and the salt stays on the surface and you say haha it doesn't dissolve in water you say no no i don't mean salt in frozen water i mean in room temperature water and just about before you're going to pour your salt in they pour in another chemical that prevents the salt from dissolving and they go aha these oh no i mean pure water and they're pure water and you see where this goes right this is a problem brought up a long time ago by hempel and then japanese published on it which is the number of possible counterfactuals is indefinitely large but we don't rule them all out right we can't because so which ones do we control for well we control for the ones that strike us as the most reasonable that make good sense that should be taken seriously that we should pay attention to and that's what we control for so we have to do plausibility judgments when we're running our experiment okay now we're done and we have our data okay so now we have our data and we're going to interpret the data what is it to interpret the data it's to derive implications from the data how many implications can you derive from any set of propositions oh guess what it's combinatorially explosive so well which one should i derive well you're going to derive the ones that make the most sense are reasonable stand to good reason right right you know should be taken seriously you think people should pay attention to them so notice what i'm showing you before during and after scientific experimentation right you have to rely on plausibility judgments first of all does that make sense as a case to you yeah it makes sense because because of the potential infinity and because of both the the limited resources and the commentary explosive you need to be making those judgments along the way to keep things running in normal fashion i think could you could you just expand for a second more on the difference between the two uses of plausibility in terms of plausibility as probably as probabilistic and why that's why that's not a good metric yeah so let me put it this way and this came out with the discussion i've done with leo ferraro probability is our estimation of where we will find truth so if we mean probability we use plausibility to mean probability all we're doing is saying probability twice we mean it's just our estimation of where we'll find truth but there's another meaning of plausibility which is we should take it seriously we should pay attention all that and that's our estimation of where we expect to find probability so plausibility is our best way of estimating where our we're going to turn up evidence that will give us clarity about the probability and then we use probability right because of the fallible nature of science to make you know to make estimations of where truth is to be found so yes that saves us from doing the numbers on every single step of the process but it allows us to be driving the right direction so we can hope to find the truth at the end of the equation that's why for example we right we i mean there's lots of other reasons for us but one of the reasons we have peer review is because peer review is to make sure that the community of experts who have somehow trained their probability judgments will right agree that right the alternative theories we're in competition with are the plausible ones the confounds we controlled for the plausible ones and the implications we derived are the plausible ones that's the whole point of peer review is it perfect no it's like democracy it's the best system it's the best system next to all the rest there's nothing better to replace it with because we peer review is our way of acknowledging the indispensability the irremovability of plausibility judgments in the scientific process i want to do away with with one potential objection that's going to that could be posed at any point but but now's a good time as ever which is an objection which i think has a lot of vogue and purchase today where any sort of pursuit after the truth or the or the correct inference from from the data is going to be fundamentally um constructed by the socioeconomic or agendas or political whatever is going on and there is no and even relying on something like plausibility through peer review is fundamentally flawed and there is no access to the truth in that regard it's sort of a very very i'm i might be strawman a little but i don't know that's fine that's fine i think that's i think that's fair uh so i mean first of all i point people to berman's work uh berman's work burman b-e-r-m-a-n who work on uh uh platonism and the objects of science where he basically argues that science depends on on on inferential generalization and i i won't repeat the argument in depth here but the basic idea is if you if you take a nominalist stance um i'll do both parts there's an epistemological point that you made and there's sort of a sociopolitical critique so let me i'm doing the epistemological point first normalism is the idea right that there's no real patterns in the world there's only right there they're just made by the mind everything is just constructed there's a deep problem with that it actually can't actually explain um how we get universal generalizations it also is and here's an argument i would want to make so it it it presupposes a profound kind of ontological dualism because what you're saying is there aren't real patterns in the world but there are real patterns in the mind because the right the connections have to exist somewhere so they exist here which means the mind is somehow fundamentally different from reality that gets you dualism and that gives you skepticism and that gives you like there's it means that the only thing that's actually intelligible to the mind is itself which means my own mind it's solipsism and so this whole thing just it collapses unsigned so if you if you do a reverse what's the best explanation for the existence of science it's that that the world is actually intelligible which means there are real patterns in it which means we i reject nominalism because it commits me to a really deep kind of cartesian dualism a human kind of skepticism and then i can't even listen to you and it undermines the very claims about against science that you're trying to make so that kind of move um i would make about the epistemic dimension the sociopolitical one is okay sorry no i think i think that's helpful to make because i think that people that that may be feeling these objections rising um whether they're trained enough or or well-read enough to understand you know the the the metaphysics that are relying upon which those critiques are relying upon can know that you know there's there's a difference of camp and you're not going to accept anonymous opinion and there's room for a debate there or or even to provide language to someone who's who's you know feeling those doubts from those areas come up so it's i think it's helpful to as as a case is made to say well we're we're we're saying this because we don't buy into this we don't buy into this and even just i mean we don't have time to to fully sketch rejection every for every metaphysics and every personality that we're rejecting because that as well leads to a combinatory explosion but but at least to to point out in in in basic where the where the boundaries of the thinking are that's right and i mean just i'll do one more again like you said this is not meant to be exhausted you know the idea that it's all just constructed um well that requires that uh is my knowledge about my mind being able to construct things it's self-constructed well oh oh no that has i have to have real knowledge that that's the way minds work in order to claim that constructivism is true how do i get this unmediated non-constructed knowledge of my own mind and tell me why that is any different than the knowledge i get from the world and then you get all you get you get an infinite regress and then you you you ultimately have to defend it by a kind of nominalism and then you get the argument i've just made the point is that these positions which are largely taken for granted are actually very are subject to very powerful critiques and for those of you who want to read it in more depth and great analytic rigor read berman's book uh so i'm just gonna i give you a gist of why i i reject that now the socio-political are people directed by funding and kind of a fucoin thing yeah again no denying that but to say that they are influenced by that is not saying they they are only influenced by that and there is empirical evidence that no in addition to all of this scientists do judge things in terms of the plausibility independent of funding issues and uh of course they're affected by my side bias but you can show that there's an independent thing at work in them and this goes to something i want to talk about later which is what is the call of reason what's the voice of reason as something that somehow cuts through all this [ __ ] um but that's exactly um something that i think you could make an increasingly good case for um if if like because what typically happens is people want to be skeptical about the stuff they don't like and then not be skeptical but the problem with these arguments is once you start right once you sort of let it go they they tend to consume everything because if the scientists are only motivated uh by uh you know money then uh how how is it that we make progress how is it we discover things like if they didn't do something that was valuable why is money being given to them like you get into these weird circles and things like that so again not denying that but if we undermine nominalism and constructivism and we say there's there has to be an independent faculty for uh assessing the plausibility in terms of the intelligibility of things then i think we can at least discharge those um criticisms enough to move on do you feel that's fair yeah i i feel like there's there's going to be a need for reliance upon a principle like plausibility itself to reject um which which which might be a bit tricky because because it's it's it might be seen as begging the question um but i well i want to try and give a justification for plausibility so i don't want to treat it as a primitive i want to try and explain okay good yeah i need to trust in it yeah i think i think i think as well what i want to add is that is that there has to be in order to function um there needs to be also a limits of skepticism and we can we can play the game of absolute skepticism that's been done from the ancient greeks to human ever and in between but uh but we're living functioning human beings and i mean and we we sleep and we drink and we eat and we we function so um so this i think there has to be some maturity in recognizing the the the mental arithmetics of skepticism for they can they can be done for for for shopping and for good things and for fun and but but if we want to unless we're going to sort of embrace the real metaphysics of the skeptic and live that life i mean have fun but but if we want to if you want to sort of be in some sort of conventional way of living and thinking there has to be also a an an understanding that there has to be a criteria um which we can ride beyond that radical skepticism with which i think is something what you're proposing here yeah that's what i'm proposing i perform and i i i think there is no good reason that the skeptic can give to me why i should take seriously propositional contradiction and not take seriously performative contradiction propositional contradiction is there's a contradiction between two of my propositions performative contradiction is there's a contradiction between my my propositions that i assert and my behavior whether it's my reflective behavior or my practical behavior and again why do i privilege like why do i privilege this and not pay attention to that i i think that whitehead is right we have to take performative contradiction as seriously as we do and so james made that argument too william james as seriously as we do propositional contradiction the burden of proof is on the skeptic why i should care about the first and not the second and it was pointed out that even pyro even pyro couldn't live out his kind of complete skepticism even though he was an extremely virtuous man so yeah that's that's that's a very interesting point that's that's a great point uh and i hope one day we get to talk about spinoz in that context as as him performatively showing that atheism could be done virtuously and but but that's that's that's a very interesting point that that yeah that we if we're going to reject a propositional contradiction we also have to reject perform a contradiction yeah that's well taken especially if you think as as i've argued elsewhere even in this series that there is more than just propositional knowing yes so so relations between propositional knowing and procedural and perspectival and participatory should matter as well okay so let's say now we've established that there is that and you've already made reference we've made plausible that there is a real thing a real normative standard called plausibility so what is plausibility when this goes to work i'm doing currently work i've done with leo farrar in the past and work i'm currently doing a book i'm writing with my son uh jason braviki uh so let me just give the uh the basic idea and then i want to try and show you the judgment instances where these judgments are being made even within sort of hard-nosed scientific journal articles okay so and um i'm going to be trying to give some credit so an idea that comes from wrestler but you can see it also in very current um work in cognitive psychology and cognitive uh cognitive science is the idea of uh convergence so the idea is uh when i have many independent lines of evidence or argument and they converge on the same conclusion that conclusion i want to use wrestler where it's words here because i think it's perfect that conclusion becomes more trustworthy i think that's the right word now why so let me explain in the abstract then i'll give you a concrete example just to make it clear so no matter what channel you're in and again i've given arguments about this last time right that channel is going to be subject to bias distortion but the chances that all of these different independent channels share the same bias are reduced precisely by the number of channels i bring in so the more independent convergence i have the more confidence i can have that i have significantly reduced the chance that my conclusion or my construct has been produced by bias let me give you an example and this goes to little kids you and even small children prefer information that is multi-sensor multi-central like come through multiple senses rather than singular so like before you get into philosophical criticism which will you judge as more real something you can only see or something that you can see and touch or something you can see and hear or something you can see and hear and touch and the answer will be well i prefer what i can see and hear and touch and and that's a preference above and beyond just seeing more right now why well because the chances that the distortions in your sight your touch and your hearing are all the same right it is reduced again by the fact that they're it's reduced precisely proportionally to the number of independent channels i bring to bear that's why you prefer multimodal intersensory information and so do little kids so do very small children right because it's adaptive it's trustworthy now trustworthy doesn't mean certain or conclusive it just means it's worthy of trust because the bias has been reduced that by the way it's not because we're all fascists why scientists like numbers we like numbers because they allow like i can see three i can touch three one three i can hear three so three allows me to coordinate inter-sensory information and that's why numbers tend to give a sense of realness okay did that first of all make sense as as an idea the that what i'm doing is i'm looking for convergence because it gives me trustworthiness yeah i think that was very helpful and i think i think it's helpful precisely because it elucidates the way that we think but we don't necessarily know that we think that way and i think i think what you're saying is so intuitive um where it's like oh yeah that's i'm looking for convergence and i'm looking for coverage precisely for that reason um so it's it's it's it's precise it's it's persuasive precisely because it's not novel but because it's it's it's it's opening up the the internal mechanisms of how we go about thinking well in general right so thank you for saying that and like i said there's lots of good empirical evidence that this in fact is what people look for and this is why they look for it um now again let me be clear we're talking about so when again we have to be very careful even when we're talking about plausibility to keep the descriptive and and the normative or the prescriptive separate we're talking about what the norm that people like seek that doesn't mean that people consistently seek this norm people of course can deceive themselves by not looking for diver like independent sources we're talking about we're talking about it as a prescriptive strategy so i want to be clear about that yeah but when people are at their think they're at their best and they're doing their best they tend to they tend to seek this out for the reasons i've given yeah okay so next they converge on the construct well what does the construct have to be well the construct can't just be a list of features and we talked about this before right right like the bird is not just its features it has to have a structural functional organization what does that structural functional organization have to afford you well we talked about this last time it has to give you an optimal grip on the phenomena right it has to give you a way of optimally gripping the world so you need convergence to to a structural functional organization that helps you get uh optimal grip on the world for solving your problems is that okay yeah i i'm following i'm following you i think that um the jargon may be less than someone who hasn't been following all these conversations okay so yeah let me let me give another visual example like i did last time okay so here's this object it's my remote right uh so uh and this is from marla ponti well how do i want to look at it do i want really close and get a lot of detail i might far away now i see the whole thing but i'm losing detail do i want to look just at its face or its side or do i want to look at it from like and notice that as i look on its back i lose its face and as i zoom in i lose the gestalt and as i look at right so there's all these trade-off relationships and the answer isn't oh find the average between them and sit there because it depends on the task that i'm trying to perform the problem i'm trying to solve if i if i if the button is sticking i want to zero in on the detail if i'm trying to get the tv as a whole i'm going to be more gestalty if i want to throw it as an object i actually care that it's three-dimensional and deep and not like really flat and flimsy right and so that's well that's what optimal gripping is and you're doing this all the time you're doing it cognitively too that's why when you walk down the street um unless you're like a particular expert in a particular expert context you'll point out an animal and say that's a dog as and this is eleanor ross rather than saying that's a cocker spaniel from north america or that's a mammal why do you go there why do you why do we sit at what's called the basic level because it gives us the best trade-offs between right the way it's like other things and the way it's different from other things between the detail and the gestalt so we're doing this all the time we we are trying to optimally grip all the time is that okay does that yeah finding that balance between this specificity and the generality also the you know but did you read tweet you're looking at the object and the degree to which you're perceiving through it i'm perceiving through my glasses right now i could be looking at them and there's a trade-off relationship there because when i'm looking at them i'm looking through them and when i'm looking through them i can't be looking at them and so do i look at a pattern do i look through the pattern and again there isn't an answer that all goes back to the relevance realization machinery so you want trustworthiness that comes to a construct that is fitting your relevance realization machinery as it's trying to do things is that is that is that okay yes good okay now what kind of things you want to do well generally this goes to another phenomena that people talk about in science which is elegance and i think scientists actually care a lot more about elegance than they do simplicity even though occam's razor is invoked all the time personal money that's why they almost always pair simplicity and elegance together so what is it for something to be elegant for for something to be elegant is for it to to here's here's my construct so it's been trustworthily formed and and then the the form it has is optimally gripping and then what i can use it to find and formulate problems in many different domains so it affords insight it forwards and notice what i'm doing i'm doing the opposite now instead of converging i want widely divergent insight that's why we like f force equals mass times acceleration from newton because it ex i can i can talk about planetary motion i can talk about car collisions i can talk about balloons rising in the app wow all these things that are so disparate i can talk about using force equals mass times acceleration that's why it's such a it's that's why we consider it elegant i can use this way of finding and formulating problems in many different domains so it affords what's called effectiveness or insight it gets you to see the significance of the information in your construct so we want it to afford us to be able to intervene in a systematic manner in reality because we judge the realness of things not only on their trustworthiness not only on their optimal grippiness but in the power they afford us to intervene in reality in reliable in systematic ways do you mean that in explanatory or predictive ways or neither i i mean it i mean it in if you're talking in science i mean it both explanatory and predictive right um because predictive means that i can sort of predict how the world's going to unfold explanatory means that i can i can give you the significance of those patterns and then if i have prediction and explanation then i have the possibility of actually creating interventions um so ultimately what we want to be able to do is to understand and we want to be able to intervene in the world with the deepest possible understanding because that's the argument that's the opposite of bullshitting ourselves okay so what you have is you have convergence for trustworthiness it converges on optimal grip and then you want divergence for elegance is that okay so far yeah yeah and i have to establish this because this is this is going to be jermaine to my argument for justifying mystical transformations okay would i be mistaken in in simplifying elegance as um explanatory and and predictive um it it depends what you mean by that because i mean a lot of plausibility doesn't have to be at the propositional level plausibility can also be the degree to which trait like that a particular construct and you know kuhn and others have pointed this out gives me sets of skills for the world so that i can do science like it opens up so often things are want to be careful they're often believed not just because they explain but also because they train they train particular sets of skills that allow the scientists to do the field work or make new kinds of observations so if i give you not only rules but tools you'll like a construct like you'll like a construct if it gives you rules you'll like a construct if it gives you tools but if it gives you tools and rules well like if i've got e equals mc squared i've got this massive explanatory thing relativity but it also allows me to make atomic weapons and i'm not making an ethical claim here but that's a very very very powerful tool right one of the reasons why we believe in you know relativity is precisely because wow you know if i if i do this really odd counter factual counter intuitive thing i can take a paper clips worth of matter and i could smash a city to the ground so i want to be clear if you mean if you broaden it to me not only tools but rules then yes something like that no no no no no yeah yeah i get i get that expansion i'm curious and this this is something that came up before when you mentioned crosstalk uh progress are we presupposing um a an ontology here of what is good that we're progressing to i mean you just brought a counterexample that a tool can be effective even if it's not if even if it's detrimental is there is is there a presupposition of what is of progress so that's what we mean there i mean so and again it depends on our topic i'm talking about plausibility in general we move back to science i think science and science presupposes epistemic progress i don't think science presupposes moral progress um that's a sort of a long discussion we could get into but i don't think most scientists um presuppose that they what the the way what does epistemic progress mean epistemic progress means that it is sorry i'm going to invoke this but we're trying to discharge it it's plausible that we i can build on previous knowledge right and that that there's a general advance so that that cultural ratcheting is a real phenomena cultural ratcheting means that unlike most organisms we don't have to start from scratch we have all of this knowledge from which we can build more knowledge kind of thing is it fallible do we discover that we have to revise it yes but nevertheless we seem to be engaging in constant cultural ratcheting whether or not and i i'm not i'm not a spencerian darwinist or anything like that social darwinism i don't think there's any necessary connection between cultural ratcheting and and moral progress they can become unglued from each other yeah yeah we have i think we have good evidence of that yes yes very good okay so trustworth trustworthiness for uh sorry conversions for trustworthiness optimal gripping divergence for elegance and then balance between them this goes from work from elijah milgram but also empirical work namely if if you're gonna if you're gonna really apply your construct in many different areas you want it to be extremely trustworthy right so what you can see so you want to balance if if if if it's not going to apply very much i don't require much trustworthiness so you say i really like vanilla ice cream okay like that's not gonna like that's not gonna open up the world in a profound way so i don't need a lot of trustworthy evidence uh for for the cl the deposit that you like vanilla ice cream even like it a lot but if you say instead to me i think that reality is ultimately a temporal it's like what okay what does that mean and like that would change how i think about so many things that approach so many problems i'm going to need a lot right you know you know and sagan sort of invoked that people get it wrong but he was trying to invoke extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence he's trying to say there's a balancing process there is that okay yeah what do you what what what are you saying about sagan and in terms of his claim you so so people invoke a claim and it's it's not a claim that comes from formal logic or mathematics but carl sagan made a claim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence which means if i'm going to if i'm going to pause it something that has a tremendous elegance in that it's extraordinary it's going to cause me to reformulate how i solve so many problems or think about so many domains i'm going to need and he doesn't just need quantity i'm going to need a lot of convergent evidence to make that construct that i'm using trustworthy that's you are you saying that logically epistemically socially what's how are you making that claim so how i'm making that claim is i'm making that claim epistemically it's the claim that uh and it's basically a cognitive claim because uh think about elegance as risk-taking so what you're doing in elegance is you're committing your limited attentional and other cognitive resources right to doing to framing the world to do this is how i'm going to do relevance realization you're committing to it you're caring about the world in a particular way and so what that means is you're taking a great you there's a risk there's always a risk when you're doing that and to to the more you commit forward the more you want to have seen and milgram puts it this way the more your forward commitments are the more your backward commitments have to be and so the more i'm risking forward right the more i want to have a trustworthy thing to mitigate that risk yeah okay i'm with you on that um i just want to say that in terms of vanilla ice cream i think that it the reason why we don't need a lot of good supportive evidence for it is because it's just so obvious that vanilla is better i know everything's chocolate is better okay with all due respect you're a priority certainty okay so let's take it that milgram is right we have this balance so we have three things right we so we have basically we we have convergence we have elegance and we have balance and and then the pivot they're balancing on is sort of the you know this optimal gripping kind of coherence i don't mean logical coherence i mean this optimally gripping kind of coherence okay now notice what happens when we when we upset the balance so what do we have what happens when we get a lot of convergence and not much elegance well and you'll see people doing this in scientific articles all the time that's that's triviality triviality is something notice when you accuse somebody of saying something trivial you're not saying they're saying something false in fact you're saying there's that they are saying that that we often say that's a truism as a way of indicating of course that's true who would doubt that but the point you're making is so what that's not that's not insightful that's not opening up anything for me right so and we and so one of the ways we screen things off is we say don't take seriously things that are trivial yeah okay what about the opposite what do i what if i have lots of elegance and very little convergence well that's when things are far-fetched that's when that's why people reject conspiracy theories right because the idea is if you would just accept that the english royal family are actually lizard beings from space look at how you can explain all of their behavior and you can but like is that a trustworthy proposal no so we also reject things because they're far-fetched right and you can see scientists doing that all the time they'll say well that's too far-fetched that's that's beyond the pale again now what you're well you know and or if people are out there saying but you know they could be wrong of course i'm not denying that that's what the point of the previous argument was okay we but this is where we fall back on this we also do things where we do a kind of bullshitting where we equivocate so one of the things we can do is um so uh daniel dennett talks about this phenomena called the deepity a dpd is like this a deepity is when people say things like love is just a four letter word and the idea is you've got convert what you've got massive convergence on the graphic reality that love is just a four-letter word right and then you've got right this the claim well that love isn't you know love isn't anything important and that would have huge implications but those are not the same claim the truth that it's just a four-letter word and is not the same as the truth that it is uh an unimportant thing in human life and what we're doing is we're we're we're we're doing convergence to one meaning and then we equivocate to the other meaning from which we get the elegance and then we get the dpd and a lot of bullshitting is that kind of deepity the other the reverse of that is called the mot and baby strategy which people do all the time you say something that sounds so provocative and challenging and then when people criticize you you retreat to something that's trivial and non-controversial people you can see people doing that all all the time right um i remember like a friend i believe in ghosts and of what you believe in ghosts and what do you mean and what i mean is that sometimes when people are grieving they hallucinate their loved ones and i said oh okay that's a martin bailey right right like the first one would be incredible i'd have to change my whole ontology the second one is trivial yeah of course that makes sense that that that's nothing okay what i'm showing you is we make and we frame all of our most rational evidence-based processing using these plausibility filters and there's lots of like i say evidence and argument around that that's that's sort of the the first argument the argument about the indispensability irremovability of plausibility to rationality yeah i think that's very helpful and i think it's very well made thank you and i think that uh the last thing he pointed out was nice because i was able to show how these what what's often used in rhetoric that that can seem convincing when you actually just look at it based on this metric you can see where it falls exactly short and that's that's very helpful to point out those fallacies as well and uh the work that jason and i are doing is to show that uh when we're talking about um understanding as different from knowledge so what most people mean by understanding is something distinct from knowing what the difference is when i know something based on evidence uh right whereas understanding is i grasp the significance or the relevance of what i know yeah and then and that the best way to grasp significance is to use plausibility so you try and grasp the relevance that is the most that fits that plausibility matrix i'm going to pay attention to what is trustworthy optimally gripping and elegant and balanced and when i have that is it is it an algorithm will it guarantee me the truth no but what it does is it gives you trustworthiness it gives you elegance it gives you a balance it gives you optimal grip yeah it's it's interesting because you are stretching the common uh sense usage of the word just a little when you talk about plausibility as that which also affords elegance um because most people i think when they think about the word possibility um they're thinking about it more from the first side that it's it's plausible in that it has a lot of good independent sources of evidence that can discount for all kinds of things like that but they don't i don't know if people would naturally think in the second direction too as falling under they they do i mean there's a continuum and so let's do that because remember these things can so there's a technical sense of plausible which is as long as there's a balance so notice your ice cream thing is actually plausible to me because there's very little elegance so i require very little trustworthiness now notice the friends that phrase when we say it makes good sense so there's an act of making and what so when people start to find a lot of plausibility then they start to invoke another term which i think is going to be relevant for our discussion they start talking about profundity it's profound which means it's highly plausible and that's why i just made the previous point it's highly plausible and it is generating a lot of understanding to say that something is profound doesn't mean it's true there is no contradiction in saying that was so profound and it turned out to be false yeah yeah yeah no i yeah i'm i'm with you on on on the extension of plausibility interaction too and i can i can follow the logic great okay so now we've established the idea of plausibility and profundity and now what i want to argue is those processes we saw at work in higher states of consciousness actually make will give us what we need in order to make a plausibility argument for those higher states of consciousness a plausible plausibly yeah a plausibly prescriptive argument so if you remember i talked about how you can see these processes yeah go ahead can i just say how much i appreciate like how much time and effort you're putting into just establishing the term which is so basic as as possibility whereas where so many could be like okay let's just assume what we all know possibilities and let's move right so talk about mysticism i think i think the very care and diligence which you're putting into it um speaks volumes of your concern for the issue so thank you for for doing that thank you for saying that i mean i don't want to be in a performative contradiction i want to make the most plausible case for plausibility if you'll allow me right um so i want to be uh exemplifying the very thing i'm advocating for um so if you remember i i i gave sort of the cognitive continuum um thesis um daniel greg and i have done work on that other people well other people have converged on that hypothesis too but the basic argument and you know there's empirical evidence that the the mystical experience part of the higher states of consciousness is something like uh well a profound insight it's an insight not just about this but an insight at a very basic level of your processing we talked about this sort of meta optimal gripping uh and so you're getting into the flow state and remember i made a distinction between hot and cool flow you're you can be in both but like you can be in the cool flow state about sort of met up your your your your primordial skill of meta optimally gripping getting getting an optimal grip on your capacity to take more specific optimal grips in the world and then if if you do that systemically and systematically that can be that can be very much like what a child goes through when they're going through a developmental stage and i made that argument last time so what we've got is that um mystical experiences are doing this this enhancement of our insight capacity now an argument i didn't quite make but it's also part of the flow work that i did with leo ferraro and erin bennett which is the flow experience also is the enhancement of implicit learning and i want to do a little bit more about that argument more explicitly right now that's okay yes so the idea is that there's again a lot of plausible evidence that we are capable of implicit learning which is we can pick up on patterns complex patterns that we couldn't we can't hold in working memory we can nevertheless pick up on them and track them and again this is a lot of empiric experimental evidence for this over decades well replicated um and and and you know it's even starting to pervade the general sort of public awareness that we're we're we're doing a lot of this implicit pattern detection so hogarth wrote a really important book called educating intuition the title is really important his main proposal about intuition is that intuition is what we get what what results from implicit learning so when i when i'm picking up on implicit patterns i don't know that i'm doing it it's it's not explicit right but i nevertheless i'm getting i'm picking up on a pattern and people will start to make judgments about their patterns they'll have intuitions so to just use com you know non-controversial examples you'll go into a particular context and you know how far to stand away from how far or close to stand to various people in the room now you you probably never went to explicit standing room school okay if the person is two notches of status above you and this is a funeral you stand this distance away but if they're the same level of you you stand here if they're two notches about you and you're at a backyard party then you're allowed to be like nobody taught you that and right you probably can't even remember that but you know it and you know it by you feel wrong if you're standing too far or close for somebody in a particular context you get an intuition as we say now when we like it we call it intuition we don't like it we call it bias or prejudice but it's the same sort of thing you're implicit learning now here's the problem there's two problems with implicit learning so that's why he called it educating intuition the two problems are implicit learning only it doesn't distinguish it just picks up on any complex pattern so it doesn't distinguish correlational patterns from actual causal patterns and that's why you can pick up on the patterns for like how far you should stand at a party but it can also pick up on weird correlations you know that make might make you a racist or a bigot right and so it doesn't distinguish well correlation from causal patterns and secondly it's it it only picks up it it can only be generated by patterns that you've you've experienced it doesn't consider possible patterns okay okay now how do we improve implicit learning so that we get better intuitions because a lot of our behavior is driven by intuition well what hogar said is well what we want to do is we want to we want to try and bring in something like the scientific method because the scientific method is the method we use to distinguish causal patterns from correlational patterns and make predictions and not just descriptions okay now what does that mean well it doesn't mean i do my implicit learning scientifically because that would be explicit and that would just be a contradiction what he means is you try and set up the context within which you're doing implicit learning so that it has the features of a scientific experiment okay so what are those features well you want there to be a tight feedback between your behavior and the environment that's like the type feedback between the independent and the dependent variable you need clear remember we talked about no confounds you need clear feedback you need i need to know be able to clearly measure what the dependent variable is doing and error matters i should be able to find out that my thesis is false error really matters okay so clear tightly coupled feedback in which error matters okay so that's here that's those are the that's the context in which we'll get the best intuitions we can get now let's go over here to chick sent my high work on the flow experience and we already talked about how that's already bridging between insight and mystical experiences right what has he said are the characteristics you need not of the envi uh like not like he said about skills meeting demands and stuff like that well he said what what are the characteristics i need in terms of information flow he said you need clear tightly coupled uh feedback in which error matters the exact same three so the three things that will improve our chance of getting implicit learning that picks up causal patterns are the three things that also will are likely to turn an experience into a flow experience the proposal we made is what flow is doing is giving you feedback that you're doing the best kind of implicit learning okay so i'm doing the best kind of implicit learning forming my best intuitions over here what about the other problem of implicit learning it only looks at existing patterns but remember what i argued last time that flow is also an insight cascade what does insight do it gets you to consider whole new ways of framing things yeah so flow is both an insight cascade that opens you up to things you haven't thought of yet and it's the place where you're getting the best intuitions about the complex patterns in your environment so flow is something that really improves your performance proves right so i'm going to use a general term for this it's de-automatizing your cognition in a very profound way now let's just note before we go back to some other points is that from dankman yes that ultimate uh the i think the ultimate origin of it but there's lots of evidence that mindfulness practices uh de-automatize cognition and thereby afford insight and and afford flow etc okay now what does deontomatization do well it's evidence that you are getting a radical you know reduction in the way in which the world can be deceiving you or misleading you you're getting the best intuitions the best ins you're really improving your problem solving capacities right and if where you're flowing is something that will transfer to many domains like meta optimal grip not only are you getting something that's very trustworthy because it's really improving your processing it's going to apply to many different problem domains is that okay so far yes good okay next thing we talked about this last time when i'm in these higher states of consciousness so the argument is that you know higher states of consciousness you remember are something like cool flow of uh meta optimal gripping which which would you know is basically oriented the problem you're solving is what is the world as a whole right kind of thing okay we also talked about how these things decenter you what does decentering do remember it moves you off of egocentrism why do we want to reduce egocentrism because it reduces bias so the automatization reduces bias the centering it reduces bias all this improvement in fluency and flow improves the functioning knowing what i'm doing i'm giving you a lots of reasons why this experience is trustworthy lots of things are flowing into it telling you that you're doing a lot in a highly convergent fashion that is reducing the biasing in your processing yeah is that okay yes okay now let's go let's do the the elegance well if if it's right notice what i'm going to get remember i said this is not going to give me like an insight here right or here it's going to be something like the kind of insight children have when they go through a developmental stage so that is massively elegant it's going to generalize right it's going to you're finding a nexus insight a kind of in a meta insight an insight into many different ways in which you might have been misframing the world in a fundamental way so that's very elegant now remember if i just did elegance without the other stuff then that's worry but now i have elegance backed by significant trustworthiness that's very elegant when the brain is doing this kind of processing it's engaging in complexification it's getting into a state called metastability it is simultaneously integrating and differentiating information very very powerfully you say what do you mean john remember the optimal gripping i'm trying to get the best relationship between integrating it into the forest and differentiating it into the different trees when you're getting both of those happening together metastability the system is complexifying why is that good well to put it into a bit of a slogan the best way of tracking a uh you know a complex world is to get your cognition into a state of ongoing complexification that is reliably coupled to the world so that it complexifies right and constrained by how the world complexifies and those two are together is that going to happen here or here or here no that has the capacity to influence almost all of your problem solving because almost always you're facing complex ill-defined problems in the real world is there a point where complexification becomes excessive and detrimental well i mean it so yeah the general systems collapse so the roman empire kept solving problems by complexifying the problem was at one point the roman empire becomes so complex that it becomes a problem as complex as any of the problems the roman empire was trying to solve and then this and then it collapses because all of its resources start to get directed towards trying to deal with it's that's why you get the endemic civil war the inflation blah blah blah so a system can't come sort of complexify uh beyond its that's why i said it has to be coupled that's why the at one minute and the flow stuff is so important right right it can't complexify independent of its ability to uh uh to solve problems in the environment but yeah a coupled complexification yeah i think i think that's an important point because i think we all know um sort of forms that complexity or complexification either in our own lives or in people that we know that represent that that are so lost in their complexification that they have no capacity to go and and get a job and buy themselves groceries which is exactly so that's exactly right so if you're losing the elegance if you lose if the if the complexity that's the structural functional organization if the complexity of your state right is is not elegant that it can't apply to many different domains and find and formulate problems in many different domains then it's precisely you're losing so if your complexity is costing you elegance then you right and that's what i think occam's razor is by the way you simplify to the point where you've got sort of optimal elegance kind of thing the analogous that maps onto your trustworthiness so occam's razor is way more sorry complex than people uh think it is okay so what we've got is notice and when when you complexify you get new functions that's the point like you know if the main relationship you have to reality is adaptivity you have to be able to evolve which means you have to introduce variation difference but you have to select it down and integrate it together so complexification it gives you new functions that continue your ability to adapt to a constantly and changing environment yes that goes in with the fact that if you remember we talked about these higher states of consciousness like insight are pers are preceded often by disruptive strategies this goes into machine learning i talked about this last time like if you're doing neural networks and you're trying to get them to learn from the environment you periodically throw in noise and disruptive strategies because if you don't they'll over fit to the data they'll lose the ability to generalize yes okay so yeah okay go ahead go ahead i think i think this is very interesting and i think it's particularly interesting because um as as technical as you're trying to lay it out which is which is commendable and and a great effort in itself it's not simple to to to break something down in its concession point so so finally which is very commendable there's a there's a spinosistic element to that as well i think i think that i think i think that together with that there's also a deep um and i keep repeating this because it keeps occurring to me there's a deep um sense of of the realness of what you're talking about because because we can all think of examples in our own lives in the lives of others where we where where these things happen where for either for the positive negative and we're going to see how those things function so we can all know what it means like to have something fitting too tightly to data and therefore being useless so so i think i think that there's there's a relationship here as well which is an optimal grip between the the specific the specific specificity and then technicality of this layout and also the relatability to real world which are quite i'm glad i'm glad i hope that i'm hoping that's the case and then we talked about the fact that you know there's a fundamental ah aspect to these experience the diminishment of the self which is normally perceived negatively but in these experiences it's perceived very positively right and i propose to the idea that the machinery of the self is being exacted well right instead of being what's it now called the glue of cognition and perception of memory we use that to glue the world um together better so that we can potentially intuit implicitly learn in an insightful manner deeper patterns in reality that are otherwise inaccessible to us so notice what i've given you i've given you lots of convergence to this meta optimal grip state which is right that's what it is by the by the the proposal of the construct and then it's highly elegant in terms of it's improving your capacity as a cognitive agent so there's balance so when that's profound the justification for it the plausibility of it becomes profound so if there's lots of convergence and there's tremendous elegance and there's tremendous optimal gripping then i've made it highly plausible which means it's profound which means it's a profound improvement in your cognitive agency and that is the only justification we can ever give for claiming something is rational that it is an improvement in your cognitive agency that's very that's very that's very beautiful one one objection which has come to mind is are we you're you refer to that experience and then the experience that you're calling that experience is a higher state of consciousness which affords uh real radical transformation um transformative higher states of consciousness is might there be an objection that that where we're selecting one very narrow form of uh what might fall under the umbrella of mystical experience um and therefore therefore playing we might be doing the fallacy which we spoke about earlier of making a good case for one thing and then switching it or broadening it right right and so that's why first of all uh i did the limit that i was trying to talk about a specific thing uh because and i think we agreed that mystical mysticism mystical experience is a family resemblance theory it's it's got a lot of overlapping things running through it like a game but what i would want to say is that um one way of arguing is um is it is it justifiable methodologically to limit it to that and i have uh because again there's lots of data and secondly these are the experiences that that track in a way where people do two things that i need for prescriptive they make significant changes in their identity and their life right but you can say right other things but they do so in a way that by sort of uh at least interpersonal or intersubjective or perhaps i'd be bolder to say objective measures they are actually getting they are actually making their lives and their selves better i mean that's kind of the work that's coming out of yaden and a whole bunch of work that uh no these people are getting better and now what you might be saying is aren't there things that are called mystical experiences where people come out of it and they're kind of crazy um well that goes towards a point i want to so i made a methodological argument now i want to make another argument which is um i and and you and i are already negotiating on this so i i'm going to say this in a slightly provocative way and then i know that'll call you out right so i'll present presented how i how i have presented in the past which is what we're talking about is something like the cultivation of wisdom that what we're talking about is something much more like rationality than a particular theoretical claim we're talking about the improvement of skills obviously states of mind and ultimately identity so we're talking about improving your procedural your perspectival and your participatory knowing and those kinds of improvements um are are are is it plausible that those improvements will occur i've made a case that it's plausible that those those improvements will occur so that justifies cultivating them yeah but and here's what i'd say is when people come out of these experiences they they can derive all kinds of crazy propositional beliefs and claims um and and they can they will in fact say diametrically opposite things people come like i said my favorite example i was reading this in taylor you know one person goes into this and comes out and reports now i know there's a god and they're so relieved another person comes out and said now i know there's no god and they're so relieved and they're happy or if they if they get a mystical experience without psychedelics they're more likely to find it a personal god whereas if they had it inside with a psychedelic um thing they're more likely to find it in a personal thing like the universe or the one right and so right here's these big contrasts you know there is a god there isn't the entity is personal it's an impersonal and so the metaphysics go all over like this right and so i tend to say the justification of higher states of consciousness in terms of the plausibility of improvement in wisdom does not transfer to a justification for metaphysical claims that are made and so if what's happening in the critic that you're giving voice to is well people come out of these and they say all kinds of crazy crap it's like yeah and i don't try and put the justification for the higher states on propositional theory i try to put it on you know again the sapiential improvement of skills states of consciousness and mind and identity yeah so i just want to be clear i just want to be clear with two things one one is that i do have some some slight disagreements as you know and i think it's i think it's good that there is some some space of difference there between us yes and and i and i respect your humility and welcoming difference from me that's i think that in itself is tremendous um what before before i get into that i just want to i just want to circle back to to clarify the previous point which is that is is it fair then to say that in this prescriptive um case that we're making we're not making the case for mysticism mystical experiences or er everything that's called mystical experiences the whole you're making the case specifically for transformative higher states of consciousness is that so to curtail it if that's the case um is there then um is there then again begging the question where we're making the case for that which is transformative um on the ground that it is transformative and we're discluding any variation of it which is not transformative is there is there a problem there there might be a problem i i i i think i know what you're saying um i just want to make clear that i'm not doing quite that circle i'm trying to take seriously that people claim that these uh lead to transformation and and sorry i want to make some they justify making the transformations they've made so we have objective measures that they improve their lives but but and they justify it by saying i touch the really real and i want to touch it more so they justify the transformations undertaking the transformations in terms of the higher states of consciousness and in many ways you know the axial religions have that kind of move at them which is right you know um what justifies you doing all this is you will you will touch the really real in some fashion onto normativity so that's the thing that i'm that's the thing i'm specifically interested about do these experiences actually provide justification for the transformation that's a specific question i think we're asking so i'm not quite i don't see myself as quite doing that circle however i think there's a point you're making which is well aren't you just excluding all the wacky things i i don't know what adjective to use uh right that where they don't afford transformation and then part of what i want to say there is then i have to make a different kind of argument which is a historical argument which is you see and it's a plausibility argument you see convergence across cultures and across time on the idea that there should be deep relationship between mystical experience and the cultivation of wisdom so i'm not invoking something that's sort of outside of historical convergence it's like no no look at all the traditions look at how the way they keep zeroing in on that the only thing that could justify these experience is that they afford the cultivation of wisdom and so i'm actually invoking something that i think is again now this is a historical argument but it's a highly plausible argument look at all the convergence and and look at the fact that that converges on you know the idea that in the end what might justify uh most of our claims for transformation is are they can we make a case for them being able to reliably improve human lives hmm yeah i think the way you were that was very clever because you you made a historical claim you turned to a historical claim that was not a propositional claim because you you phrased it as wisdom uh where where where one could have for the same price going for a claim of that these transformations were coupled with a i don't know encounter with the divine which which which can be you know which is exposed propositionally metaphysically so uh so well played there now however i like like like i said i've already previous videos in the series i've given ground and i'm thinking no and you know i i i take it that there are certain propositional theoretical claims that should also be taken seriously from the trustworthy from the plausible state the plausibly sapiential state of the mystical experience and all this convergence historical convergence towards the idea that the mystical experience presupposes the the it presupposes a deep in fact i'm going to now a profound intelligibility and that intelligibility and realness are bound together i made this argument before and then that we have to then ask what must the world be like such that this intelligibility could exist yes and i'm reading gerson's book on ancient epistemology and and he says you know that that's sort of the primary question the primary question isn't how could i possibly know like humor descartes the question is let's let's let's presuppose that intelligibility exists because that's presupposed by everything else what must the world be like such that it's intelligible and i think there are propositions that are then derivable about what must the world be like in order to have the kind of intelligibility that is disclosed in mystical experiences and also what must cognition be like in order to be able to pick up on and pursue that kind of intelligibility so i do think there are theoretical claims that come out that way yeah i i think i think that's i think that's a that's a fine point and i think that we're going to see more of that in our upcoming upcoming conversations where we're looking at that convergence between between the rational and the real to phrases what i might that that that's a point which which is which is abstract uh which is which is okay but i might maybe maybe just to try yeah please something a bit simpler which is i think that just like there's a convergence um in the ways that you're lining it up i think there's also a a converge a metaphysical or propositional convergence um amongst the mystics um both ancient and contemporary and both in cultures that were co-influenced and as far as we understand not influenced by each other and i think that i think that that metaphysical convergence which also has plausibility because it also engages um in in affordances in in the real world um even as far as as a proposition goes is something worth paying attention to and i think that by focusing um i'm not sure who it was that you quoted by focusing on on the divergence of the proposition that that oh um i i now know that there is a god i now know that there is no god i now know that santa claus is real i now know that um and that's that's simply i think i think it's a facile um um dismissal of proposition of metaphysical claims and i think that what is better what would be important to be done um with the with the with the assumption that uh with the assumption of what the proposition might be which which i think and and and and we think is is might be some sort of claim towards a unity or nonduality between subject and object between knowing and known however that's going to be phase it can be i mean metaphysically might be put out into a more full-blown monism of some sort but not even needing to go that far i think that a better question would be to those participants and i think this can be done contemporaneously and historically that thing which you realize was not god and that thing which you realize about what was your relationship with that thing and if i put my money on it it would be oh i felt really warm with it i felt reminded i felt really unified with that thing i felt really um present in its presence and embraced by um and and that would be i think that would be said of both of both the the all and and the none um that's that's that's my that's why that's my that would be my counter argument for using using the probabilistic argument for a for a metaphysical claim not towards an entity or a being or a deity but simply the the what was the the what was the texture or the qualia of that relationship and and my bets are and and i think that the evidence points to this that it's that it's towards unitive so i agree with that um and i i um i was trying to point towards that with you know propositions ultimately about the intelligibility because that's what you were doing right yes um and that and notice that the historical argument is convergent with this structural argument the cognitive scientific argument because already in flow states people are talking about at one minute and i've given a case that that's not fluff or ephemeral that points to real improvement in a real picking up on the real patterns in reality so i i you know i think um i think that's right i do think um i i guess i disagree with you on that i do think real questions uh i think there are real debates between theism and non-theism for example about mystical experiences and john hick talks about this in the interpretation of religion um and whether or not right um and mystics themselves of course have gotten into hot water about this historically cross-culturally cross-historically right um whether or not the experience that of at one minute ultimately is best understood non-theistically or theistically um and i think there is variation on on that uh and the reason why i say that is because i i i am worried about i'm not accusing you of this you're sensitive and you're careful and i want to pay the compliment back to you that you paid to me but you know there is there is kind there is a pernicious kind of perennialism that is a kind of just an ethnocentrism right that all religions are somehow versions of or like the abrahamic religions and i think that's something that i i want to i want to open up the possibility uh for you know for buddhism and taoism for for sunyata and the dao as also ways of talking about this and and you and and and you were careful to bracket that off you said you know they're not making claims about a particular entity or being and and so i think that's right here's the problem i'm trying to i'm kind of a counter problem your problem which is but it's not it's also not the case that the mystic just stays within the mystical experience the mystic almost always and this was katz's whole point the mystic always also tries to weave it into sometimes conforming sometimes trying to transform but tries to weave it into their religious framework and their religious heritage and therefore makes a lot of claims that do are sort of more specific claims about specific entities and specific uh you know obligations to those entities and things like that and that's where i see all that tremendous variation i i don't i so i'm trying to acknowledge that yeah yeah what what what i'm saying is something different i'm acknowledging that there is variation i'm not i'm not trying to say that there's a homogeneity of of of yeah right reputational experience not all but what i'm trying to say is that is that when we have both variation um and we have both um similarity if there's that there might be a good case to to make to to discount the distal and to to focus on what is united in those claims and i'm doing this explicitly in an attempt to include um every form of of buddhism taoism i'm not i'm not making an abrahamic name here i'm not making a name for a transcendental personal theistic object i think i think most mystics even within those traditions end up sounding more like atheists than anything else i agree i'm the the and i think cats is wrong um in cats is right on these points of of that they're going to be interpreted in inevitably into their into their frameworks and katz does catch his article he he does this you know very uh clever erudite reading where it's like oh well the kabbalist is talking about tense furored and the the daoist is talking about these things these have nothing to do with one another how could there be anything and what cats is doing is if i can give an analogy let's say let's say this there's ten people walking down down a road right and they all see a tree and um and once and and they come back together a port of the tree and one was like oh well you know the bark was really brown the other one's like oh the leaves were really green the other one says oh the roots are really red it's like oh my gosh there's there's redness there's greenness there's no congruity there's nothing here there's no coarse there's nothing which they experience there's nothing um or if we if we look at their if we look at their narratives right if we if we did the the cats are the cat's famous cat's article where instead of listing out all of the differentiations between them oh look there's a god and god has a female partner look there's no god at all there's nothing else instead let's focus on the the claim which they all are making which is that there is a fundamental unity being which which the individual uh unites with the real or and and david lloyd makes this case very well for the buddha to include the buddhists that that the the implosion of the subject of the subject object distinction can either implode outwards or sorry explode outwards or employed inwards where where all the self or no self developing in non duality uh makes a really great case of that and i think that i think that by i'm not trying to make any particulars to claim that that any one proposition uh towards one specific interpretive you know religious those things are inevitable but i think that we can look beneath the surface of all of them um and and and look for the tree beyond all of the the the differences seen great so good so then i could make a i can so you've made a recommendation i think it's good and then here's the recommendation i'm going to make on the basis of your recommendations so ultimately what we're doing is we're i mean this is john hicks we're facing we have finite ambiguous data and then we're making judgments about similarity or dissimilarity and nelson goodman like showed there's no algorithm for doing that that's ultimately based on well this is a relevant thing this is not a relevant thing because any two objects are logic are logically indefinitely large like similar to each other and then definitely large dissimilar to each other and so what i would want to say is okay but what you're doing is you're pointing to universals right and then what i would say is what you can use is independent of the historical convergence argument which is the traditional way it's been done aldous huxley perennialism right is no no but what we can do is we can say there's another way of looking for universals which is science cognitive science and we can come up with right this argument that i've run and this argument that i've run can then constrain the kind of similarities we're looking for in the historical record we don't just find any oh it happens that all almost all these mystics were men ah there's something male about well no that's ridiculous that's a that's an irrelevant similarity right so where do we look for the relevant similarities what i'm saying is you should do what you're doing i'm not i'm not i'm not trying to dismiss it i'm saying but you you need to justify why you're picking out this similarity as relevant or important and what you can say is well because it lines up with another way in which we look for universals which is what science is and that descriptive discovery of universals also comes with a prescriptive argument as to how it improves people's cognition in a universal manner so that's what i'm actually recommending yeah so yeah so so i think i think i think then we're in agreement here i'm not i'm not trying to make uh an exclusive claim and this is this is the only way to reach i think i think that there's uh there's many but but i but i do think that this is an important part of it and i think discounting the the metaphysics and the proposition simply because there's incongru incongruity um would be it would be the same reason to discount everything else and and i think i think it it needs to be part of the rest of the con of the congress i agree so what what i'm claiming is if you agree that there's that intersection between the cognitive scientific argument and this uh cross-historical argument cross-contextual argument then it it it tells me well where should we where where's the connection point i think it's where we we so i'm trying to justify why are we zeroing in on intelligibility the intelligibility and the at one minute why are we zeroing in on that is a that's an important similarity well again you can you can leap out of sort of a historical question begging by saying but look that at one minute and that intelligibility is can be given a completely independent explanation uh from the c from a cognitive scientific framework and so that's why uh i mean i i i you you know from the awakening for the media crisis i'm always trying to get an intersection between historical arguments and structural arguments and try to and thereby give sort of this notice what i'm doing a convergence argument i'm trying to generate increased possibility absolutely so i guess what i want to say though is um i i wanted to i i guess i want to be really i want to be really respectful and sensitive to what you've said but on the other hand i want to our culture is obsessed with propositions right it's really obsessed with propositions um and and and and infra inference and part of what i'm trying to argue for let me try it this way i'm trying to argue for the rationality of these experiences but because what they do is reliably improve your ability to get into contact with what's real right and be in right relationship and i think that's the ultimate obligation of rationality that's the ultimate you know obligation to the logos um and i tried to argue this before right that that there are for that there are forms of rationality that go outside of propositional inferential rationality yeah and and and the reason why that's central to our argument and this goes and i wanted to bring this up it's the work of l.a paul she literally wrote the book on transformative experience and the main argument she makes there is you cannot propositionally infer your way through a transformative experience it doesn't work you can't do that um and you have to drop out in because it has to do with it has to do with perspectival and participatory knowing she uses slightly different terms but i have i've mapped those on to her terms in her presence and she was happy with that so i'm not worried about that um and so i i think that there and agnes callard has talked about this as proleptic rationality the idea that whenever we're going through significant developmental transformation we cannot infer our way through it i mean it goes back to an old argument by folder you can't infer a stronger logic from a weaker logic you just can't do it so you need not there has to be if we're trying to get people to go through the transformation even of becoming more inferentially rational there has to be a non-inferential way in which they go through that acquisition of rationality right and so i think saying that because like because because the the mystic cannot give us any inferential content of any significant degree it's ineffable right in terms of you know in profound ways that instead of making that a worrying thing that makes us say oh it's probably not rational because that there's a way of saying no no if we've got all this other independent argument that it's really affording transformation in a way that's rationally justifiable then we should say no no that's a good thing because it points to the kind of proleptic rationality that is actually needed to undergo transformation yeah the kind of rationality you use to justify transformation is not inferential argumentative rationality it's proleptic aspirational rationality yeah yeah i i hear what he's saying i i get that and i appreciate that i i wonder if i mean i think i think you may yourself have employed this this sort of the ancient analogy of gnosis yes knowing which is which is which is more than propositional um and and i appreciate i appreciate the desire to to to distance from the propositional in a day and age where we've become overly propositioned yeah a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek expression um so i i i you have me with that well and the reason is is because i wanna i wanna sort of i wanna have a response to a kind of knee-jerk reaction to well there's no you know they don't offer any arguments they just point to their experience and therefore it's not rational it's like no no no you've misunderstood i've given you how this is all taking place outside of the propositional and then you know if you work if you look at the very tight arguments of l.a paul and agnes callard jerry fodor even who came out of computational cognitive science right right you can't or think about again the neural networks throwing in the noise to overcome the overfitting that's a non-inferential non-proposition we have to use these strategies in order to become more rational the process of becoming more rational can't itself be an irrational process that makes no sense that's a deep performative contradiction so the processes that make us more rational have to be included in our definition of rationality and these are the processes i've been pointing to yeah would you say that that that outside of the propositional um there are other ways which the mystic tries to point to this transformation um and those may be performative they may be evocative maybe um whether that's in i mean you see you see it happening in in poetry you see it happening in art you see you see it happening in the way which they live forth those things would you include those as well as part of very much very much i mean you know as the child is to the adult the adult is to the sage you know you know and there was a proverb growing up i don't know if it's still around you know uh children pay attention to what you do what more much more than what you say right and so they're mot they're internalizing you as a comprehensive model of the procedural the perspectival and the participatory they're identifying with you they're getting their meta perspectival ability which is central to wisdom from internalizing your perspective they catch skills they catch points of view from all of that and that is going to be much more profound um than your propositional admonitions admonitions not that those not those shouldn't be spoken or they don't matter i'm not saying that but we know that you know again it's much more what you do than what you say and therefore uh it's much more likely that the mystic is going to can is going to convey by x by exemplification rather than just pure explanation and in fact they're going to tailor their explanations to constantly be in service of provocative ex exemplification they have to be or again they're going to be engaging in a kind of performative contradiction yes yeah i think i think that i think that's true and i think i think it also stands to i think it just stands historically as a as a true statement so the thing about that then is you know then we're into a really tricky question which is the question of yes yes but you know you don't have to choose your parents and it's largely a matter of luck and you know and a lot of people suffer because they they have poor luck now now now the question comes about you know how to choose your sage um and um and and that's again where again that's part of my caution around trying to get parochial about this and say there's a particular you know you know metaphysical world view for where i have to look for my sage and so i i take that question very seriously um that's why i really i really like the work you're doing i like isn't the right word i really appreciate the work you're doing because you're doing this very careful reflection so that you afford people the chance of making a choice and let's be clear this is not the choice to just believe propositions this is the this is the choice to internalize somebody as an exemplar in terms of which you're going to aspire to greater wisdom and greater at one minute with reality and so i think and and again this this sounds like i know it's self-promotional but you know every everything's self-promotional right now the point i'm trying to make is these kinds of this kind of deal logos is really really really important if choose if if everything we've said comes down to you've got to choose the right sage than the deal logos that trains us procedurally and perspectively and in a participatory fashion to get clear relationship right relationship with these people so that we can make and we have to the best machinery at our disposal to choose the sages whom we're going to internalize that's the pivotal question and where where else are we going to be find our school for that other than this this is this is i'm sorry i mean i belong to university and i do science and it matters to me but the most important school is this school right now because the the the question that ultimately this is going to turn on is who is going to be and i don't mean just one it could be more than one but you know when you get more than one you just gets problematic but anyways right who's going to be the exemplar for you that's to me that's almost like the kirker guardian existential choice and like you can't you can you can't make it just running off like reading their propositions you you have to try and bring them to life give them voice welcome them into living dear logos sorry i'm going off on something but this is just a question yeah i i i think it's a great tangent i want to i want to um really agree and disagree with you okay uh one i'll begin by agreeing [Laughter] so that if the disagreement is is grievous enough egregious enough at least we'll at least i'll have a chance to agree okay um the the the the point the point i like to agree with first um and to repay the compliment is that is that i think that um more more than any of the propositions which i received from you john and you've put out a lot of proposition work and a lot of good evidence and you're a man of science and that's uh really really terrific it's it's been the the experience of being in relation with you and and experiencing care and concern and generosity humiliating conversation that's been um most transformative for me um and the thing which will last with me longer so that's a point of first personal agreement uh and and returning compliments so thank you for that now now to disagree okay um um i think that i i'm wondering it seems to me like you've made a bit of a leap here um and you haven't done the work to show the i'm acknowledging the very real possibility that that has happened okay okay okay so so where where i think that leap is i think i think that there is a necessity for this um for the proleptic for the participatory for this it's more than positional for for the for the for the experiencing and not just the hearing but but i don't know why necessarily um why why by logical necessity it must be done through um internalizing a teacher and through finding a guru as as you put it i i know in history mr system that happens all the time in my own tradition it's something which is shoved down my throat that must you must have you must have a guru um i i i i'm going to preempt something that you may answer which is that i know that there's good empirical evidence for the benefit of of doing this transformational journey within the sapiential community and that's i think very clear and plain and maybe even common sense at this point what i what i what i want to perhaps rest the case to get it back to a fundamental level is that if you believe um that that that reality is um is fundamentally intelligible and that we can come to an optimal grip of ultimate grips of reality um which can lead to our own transformative psychological experiences which leads us to be a sage that seems to me on a foundation level should be able to be achievable by anyone because it should be germane to the the the reality of existence and the reality of the human and the relationship between them and and the fact that we need and other things may help it may be great to have a guru maybe great to have a community but the fact that we need any of that um i'm not seeing i'm not seeing the work i'm not yeah that's fair enough so i mean the lesson and take that's that was good and i'm also going to hold open the possibility as my friend jordan hall likes to say that the next buddha is the sangha that your exemplar might be a community rather than an individual um i should have been clear about that um and there's a sense in which you know within christianity the distinction between jesus as an individual and the church as the body of christ was purposely blurred towards good end in a lot of cases um so i want to acknowledge that's happening it's something that's just happening a mystical tradition where there's been an intentional um d leadership um trying to force the community to become the leader itself which which but for another time okay so good so i want to be clear that it um yeah there was there was an implicit bias that i want to uh sort of give up explicitly right now which is that doesn't have to the sage doesn't have to be like an individual to say the buddha can be the sanger to use jordan's uh very perspicacious way that's a great it's a great phrasing yeah so first of all to acknowledge that secondly um the the the the so i could make an argument for this but i'm just i think the core bias is what's called the my side bias sort of the egocentrism um and the problem with that with the problem with the perspective is when you're in a perspective it is very hard for you to see how the perspective is biasing you and it's very hard to acquire interests outside the the prolactic aspirational interests that exceed um so let me uh that exceed your perspective and then this remember we talked about the solomon effect with the centering right right right um and people don't spontaneously do that but right but they've been trained to be able to take the perspective of others precisely because they're cultural beings not just autonomous beings so let's put all that as a background then i want to talk about an experiment right and it goes towards all of this and so the experiment runs something like this you bring in a chimp um and in phase one of the experiment there's a box and it's completely opaque and there's a there's all these levers and buttons and you push them and flip them and then like a candy comes out the bottom like or a grape something the chimp really likes now what's really cool is you watch this experiment and you only show the chimps the sequence like twice and then the chimp replicates it and it's that bad in itself is like really impressive wow and then you take the chip out you bring in a four-year-old like a four-year-old girl right and you sort of you just sort of get out the human flag and go human come on right and right and you do the same thing in the open pig box and you do all this stuff and you only have to show the girl twice and then she can replicate the sequence you go right oh that's good now you now you go into the second phase of the experiment you bring the chimp back in and now the box is completely transparent it's a plastic and what the chimp sees is that all of the movements except the last one do absolutely nothing it's only the last movement that releases the grape and you do this twice and the chips sort of almost you can't see them look right and they just do the last thing right when they're given their chance to get the grape out because like why am i none of that's doing anything right now you bring in the little girl now with the transparent you do all of this twice and what does a little girl do she repeats everything that the adult does and you think oh human beings are stupider than chimps and then you think no no no what is she doing she is trusting that there's a perspective that she doesn't have that has purchase on reality that she doesn't have and because of that long term she's going to out compete the chimp because she's going to be able to grow into a perspective the chimp is locked into their it's a brilliant perspective they're smart animals and i'm not trying in fact that's really impressive but the thing is that's as far as it goes right where the little girl has access and so what i'm proposing to you is that other people are the indispensable way in which we acquire the capacity for self-transcendence that without other perspectives we're in the place of the chimp because you what you'll say is i'll generate perspectives other than my own that's very hard for you to do from within your perspective it's it's an interesting idea it's an interesting idea to think about for for many reasons one is because it relies upon the the real acknowledgement of of the of of there being a perspective of the other of their being the other yeah which which maybe just to think ahead here a little um on positions that embrace forms of monistic idealism it may be hard to get out of your own mind if they're only is mined at large yeah yeah yeah yeah you may become sticky i have to i'll i i i would like to talk to bernardo about that at some point um yeah and uh um although i think i think i can anticipate what he would say but then so now i'm all right i'm already running the beautiful dance oh it's it's so lovely like it is with you it's so lovely to to to just do that with him um so yeah i mean i i'm sort of doing a burden of proof argument i'm giving i'm like i'm admitting that after you've done this a lot and if you're in a community with other people so you can continue to do it you can then do it like on your own that's what internalization is but i don't know other than internalization how you get a metaperspectival ability i don't know any other proposed explanation of that that i that that has any good plausibility to it if i if i don't being so self-referential again but what's interesting is that a lot of a lot of mysticism um you know there was an old tripod um typology of mysticism which is not much used by scholars anymore which is god mysticism sol mysticism nature mysticism i think it's a zener or one of these one of these earlier fellows and but what is interesting what remains true of that and the reason what gave this tripod um taksani was because of so much of mystical experience which is triggered specifically not in communion with other minds but in nature um and i don't know whether that points to um to evidence of of this being able to be done individually or if there's some sort of pan psychic um attachment to to mind nature but but that seems to be a phenomena i mean it's it's obviously not in in total isolation from from community and people that are in nature also talking to people but but the there seems to be some sort of a hot hot box um of mysticism that happens in nature yeah and i think that's right first of all like yeah the idea that those people are have not already internalized another capacity for perspectives you know you're not going to get a lot of nature mysticism for example with a four-year-old or something like that um typically um so that all right pretty pretty universal in fact the other thing is we have to remember that we we didn't evolve in a nature that we related to as if it was an impersonal order we evolved in a nature that was actually filled with other minds predators and prey and potentially other human beings right so nature has the capacity i mean and some people have even extended this within cognitive science to be to an overly reductive account of religion religion is just where we have a hyper active agency detector machine and wherever there's ambiguous information we project an agent there and that's how we get god um well i think that plausibly at work as a factor trying to reduce religion to that i think is is really over overly reductive nevertheless the idea that nature if we i think have been socialized to a significant enough degree can powerfully like expose us to perspectives and here's where what i want to add to it with other minds and other perspectives that are not human i think that's one of the ways that in which debbie are you there i paused the recording and so it was only a couple seconds there um oh just no no technology is the god that limps um so um i was making the argument that uh nature precisely because it puts us in you know a plethora of minds many of them non-human actually has a tremendous capacity uh to decenter us and also to put us in the flow state and do all kinds of things um and that we can internalize that in a way and um that strikes me again as very plausible um it's you probably are going to need again some basic training in a meta-perspectival ability and you're going to need some way of grocking your natural environment such that it's internalizable to you rather not as just sort of chaotic you know other minds but as some sort of like an ecology basically there's got to be something that ecologizes the world for you so it's internalizable and so i i think i could make a good case for that being incorporated in what i'm saying yeah i i'm hearing i'm hearing um i'm hearing the direction of a possibility argument uh but not necessarily a a necessity argument but but um well yeah i mean uh i'm not trying to preclude that there might be something more there i do think that there are also mind-like things about the ecology like say of a forest um that you know and uh alicia uraro makes the argument you get you got to sort of get your mind into like a dynamical system state itself through narrative or other such things in order to pick up on you know the implicit learning picking up on that complex dynamic patterns and you may use imaginal strategies to do that like children use imaginal strategies to develop the requisite identities and skills and states of mind um and so i think like i doubt that if you just simply dropped somebody in some completely foreign environment of nature that would necessarily trigger a mystical experience i think they'd just probably be overwhelmed but if they had proper education about how to enter into it then it strikes me that that would be plausible uh it strikes me as possible that they could get a mystical experience out of it yeah you know you know what's interesting that's coming up in this regard is there's there's a tradition of muslim philosophy um and i think there's two cases there's one from it been rushed i think it is um who he has this thought experiment of the other person just floating in the in the either um and there's another one of uh there's another one which is a philosophical novel of this fellow who's dropped on an island and he comes to the same enlightenment that's that uh that that that islam provides and then he comes back to civilization and there's a sort of this whole dialogue between um so there i mean the the motif of the philosopher slash mystic as the recluse as the alone to the alone as the as the one who who who come to these realizations um is is it is it's an interesting it's interesting that you're rejecting that um and it'll be interesting to to sort of to see the play between those um sort of long-standing historical motifs and and the space where they themselves were for affording the the capacity to to get over one's own um biases with with um with with contact with the with with external minds yeah yeah i mean it's also the case that um i mean you know the tradition i'm familiar with of course is is the uh is the desert fathers within christianity and of course they aren't alone um they're with another mind which namely the mind of god and you know we we do have good research that if you simply imagine another perspective especially one greater than your own that that can trigger the solomon effect but again we also have good evidence that that capacity to imagine that isn't something that you just sort of of like have it has to be carefully cultivated in a lot of ways yes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i was going to ask if if the mind of god counts as another mind because that certainly seems to be present in many so there's actually i can't remember the authors you get people to pray to santa claus and they know the value of santa claus but they don't believe in santa claus and they're believers and then you get them to pray to god and what you'll notice is when they're praying to god the machinery is very much the brain is operating very much like when it's talking to another mind and then that's not the case when they're praying to santa claus so there's something going on there's a there's a functional difference at least again i'm not making any metaphysical claims about god or santa claus but that but that functional one is interesting in and of itself of of uh which which might which might be an interesting line of inquiry um in terms of the the functionality of that entity i mean so there's a lot of like modern intelligent mysticism who want to say that the gut idea is one which is employed by mystics to try and give a sense of what it was which they were in contact with and now with that functionality argument it might be interesting to think about what's what what the the the concept of god provides as an affordance for one trying to make contact with an external mind yeah so i mean i i talk about the imaginal as opposed to the imaginary the imaginary's the mental image the imaginal is like when you're pretending and you're acting and then we we can we can we can we can think about the idea of like virtual augmentation like a heads-up display and then we can put the two together we can get you know imaginally augmented reality and so you know we can use these imagina we can do the serious play because we're trying to develop and transform with imaginable augmentation that gets us into the right functionality to get into the right relationship which doesn't mean that that particular pretense right is sort of the accurate picturing of the right of the the the pull of the you know that the the thing that we are in relationship with uh very much yeah right right it's it it's interesting that that's the path towards the real you you made the case before that the path towards the rational must itself be rational but over here there's an implication that the path towards the real can also uh employ things which which are not the real yeah so right and so i i want to say that again um that um i i think in the way i've done it very carefully at least according to you uh i guess also according to me uh you know a argument for the proleptic rationality of higher states of consciousness that precisely lack any content and therefore in some sense are the most impoverished um i think i could make a similar case for the proleptic rationality of the imaginal i think in many ways that's what corban was trying to do in his work i think and that's why his work is really pivotally important right now as he was trying to say no no there is a way there like because he unlike jung corbin was much more willing and and repeatedly uh i i self-identified as a neoplatonist and there's a way in which no no like i can ultimately justify uh the the the i can give you a pro-proleptic justification there's a proleptic rationality to the serious play you can't infer your way through it how do you overcome like how do you go through transformative experience i've got a lot of argument out there you deal with children to do you have to go through the serious play right you have to create that play space and and that is where you make those procedural and perspectival and participatory transformations that are necessary for you to come into right relationship with the real so if you could show that they're systemic they're systematic and they're reliable for realizing that you can justify that practice as proleptically rational yes yes yes that that works that makes sense so i i should uh i should start wrapping this up because if we keep going that's going to be too long and i think i i think you i'm i'm exhausting you too and i it's much later for you than it is for me so i don't want to keep you too much longer i just wanted to um thank you you did a great job at drawing me out um and drawing me forth and challenging me and and pushing on me with affection and respect so i really appreciated that i think this is a great place uh to sort of finish our our series and um and so i'm looking forward to our next one with you and i and guy i think it'll be uh really really wonderful but thank you for being such a such a powerfully present and participatory partner in what we've what we've done together so thank you very much thank you i really i really appreciate that deeply i think i think that it's a real challenge to to try and maintain that that that presence and that balance between being critical and appreciative particularly doing it through a screen i think this is a whole new challenge for yeah yeah yeah i mean i i've learned so much um about doing that from you in conversation um and so so thank thank you for that and i think yeah i really do i do i i can go with you this is quite a beautiful conclusion to to this to this series it's come to a nice slow gradual nice landing as we as we're here and i am i'm it is possible united here so i think my physiology is helping come to that sort of that red eye landing um but my my real hope is that we one day have the opportunity to to see each other face to face into a hug and sit down yeah i mean i've got i've gotta i've gotta come to europe and to uh to israel i want to see bernardo i want to see you there's all kinds of people i want to i want to meet in person very much i hope why don't we make a conference one of these days we should we should we should make a conference about all of this uh that's actually been mentioned to me by greg greg enriquez about making a conference around this i think that's a very real idea and we should think about doing it uh yeah hopefully we're basically getting released from the grip of covet so hopefully but anyways we have this next thing we're going to be doing and i'm very excited about that yes yes i think it's going to be an interesting change of gears from what we're doing here what we're doing here has been much more slow and rigorous and tedious and i think that can be much more grasping and much more poetic hopefully if anything from my conversation with and your conversation as well with guy indicates it's going to be a lot of fun so i'm very much looking forward to it yeah it'll it'll be it's uh it'll be not that it won't be totally platonic but it'll be more heideggerian than platonic with with guys which has great benefits to it so anyways i'm going to let you go so you can go to sleep but thank you so much and i'll uh i'll send you a link uh as soon as this is up and uh and i look forward to uh our work in the future so have a good season my friend youtube john thank you so much okay bye bye bye brother 
welcome everyone to voices with raviki i'm very uh very excited about this uh session um so we have um zevi now you just told me your last name and i forgot to pronounce uh as many of you know from the announcements this is part two of uh ongoing discussion uh that xavier and i are having on what you might call the philosophy and the cognitive science of mysticism what do they have to say respectively what do they have to say together do they disagree and it's been incredibly rich i encountered zevi not that long ago and it's it's funny because we had an extended conversation i feel like i've i've got a you know somewhat intimate connection with him but i just met him not that long i met basically met him yesterday well not in person but virtually in person and it was just shortly before that i had seen uh a brilliant video i highly recommend it i recommended it at the time a brilliant video on whether or not spinoza was a mystic and he laid out carefully a careful five-point argument it was both exegetical and logically presented in a fashion very reasonable and very plausible and it's all right it was efficient position that i i also agree with for independent arguments but i thought it was just well done um i highly recommend you check it out and the other uh work he's doing on spinoza i'm intending to make my way through those um and then i commented on how brilliant it was and he reached out to me and he said he watched um uh awakening for the meeting crisis and so we thought we should start talking uh but um i think it'd be good right now zebby if you took sort of uh center stage even though there's no stage um and uh you know talk a little bit about yourself well when i was on your channel i did uh some of my autobiography uh and you alluded to some connections but maybe open it up a bit more and then where you're coming at and then what um what are your main projects and goals for your youtube channel uh seekers of unity uh because um i think it's a channel that should have a higher prominence so i'm gonna turn it over to you firstly thank you so much john for having me on it's a really real pleasure to sit and to talk and connect with you it's it's i mean it's we're in a really fascinating space where we're trying to find community and find conversation and find relation and find intimacy and doing it through screens is a very fascinating challenge whether at all we can create community and relationships like this is a great question but if if there's anything that's been proven for the past two days it definitely is possible there definitely is a possibility at least on a one-to-one basis because i do feel already quite close to you and i think part of that is is your with your own theory of love which is that there's mutual and reciprocal self-disclosure yeah so you share of your story and your intimate and personal story which which which was really very touching and resonated very deeply with me um so let's let's let's respond in tone my story is different as everyone's story isn't it in a beautifully different yet fundamentally sometimes similar way i grew up in a hasidic community my parents were sent as emissaries by the bhava toraba to sydney australia all the way from from brooklyn and i grew up as something of an out of like an insider outsider because i was living within my own kasiri community but i was living within the broader australian community i was an outsider both because i was you know a jewish young young child and young adult and the jew is in some ways the perpetual outsider historically yeah and so then as being a hasidic and orthodox jew even within the jewish community you're there's again another level of outsiders right and a lot of a lot of that sense of um of perhaps like an existential isolation um was something which i which i didn't necessarily cognize and understand consciously at the time as a child but retrospectively i could see how that was took a part and shaped my identity and what was really a watershed moment for me which i mentioned briefly in our first conversation was discovering that not only were the ideas the general sort of ideas of let's say monotheism or ethics that judaism teaches shared by other traditions those are all kind of facadel things although you know as important as they are and they certainly are but what i found really blew my mind when i was 15 or 16 was that like the deepest secrets of the jewish tradition which was like the hasidic wisdom the kabbalistic secrets the esoteric metaphysics that i was being taught and and in such a selective and exclusive way many of these texts still haven't been you know taught to the public haven't been translated are barely understood by people outside of the community and then through a strange uh chance of occurrence and a novel that i was reading and mentions of initially christian mysticism i became acquainted with christian mysticism with its very strong neoplatonic influence and i later came to understand that there was a shared historical influence and shared philosophical language and shared metaphysics that were grounding these traditions um which but at the time just discovering their commonality on a metaphysical level so so raw and so indisputably really knocked my socks off and and then i as one does i got interested in eastern thought um first through you know huxley and watts and and uh and terence mckenna and all those but then more seriously and more academically and then my focus is my focus shifted more to really to western mysticism and to that tradition that emerges from plato through the abrahamic faiths and and beyond and trying to my real quest i think since then in some protracted way and different themes have had different sailing to me throughout time for a long time it was a theme of of death and rebirth immortality that was a very strong theme for another time it was an associated theme of the theosis hypnosis or apotheosis of the individual right they can be applied through through different forms and different traditions different different points picked up salience and i was sort of trying to stitch together these sailing ideas in across the different traditions and i think where it's kind of evolved to and it's where it is now and i think it's still growing i'm still quite young and it's still part of the excitement is that i have no idea where it's heading is is really looking at the deepest the deepest wisdom that each one of these traditions possessed that have been painstakingly cultivated over millennia of silent introspection reflection and dialogue internally and and now and although an at scant moments in history there were moments of contact and and passing of ideas which which i'm also studying quite avidly but more or less these things were done internally and now really on a grand scale for the first time historically there's an open marketplace of ideas facilitated by things like the internet by the technologies that we have and the question is are we going to utilize those technologies to enslave ourselves to the to the to the worst angels of our nature to use steven pinker's term or we're going to allow ourselves to use this moment to find a unified narrative that can guide us both in our personal lives in our in our interpersonal dealings and in our relationship with the world around us and perhaps with something deeper or beyond whatever you want to use your language for the for the ontological reality that in the west gets a capital g yeah um so and and i think those relationships are so crude and i think i think a lot of your work and if i'm talking too long here you can interject but i think a lot of your work okay good i think a lot of your work on the meeting crisis is is really looking at the same contemporary issue in a very related way i mean you i think i think john i'm going to give away my age here but i think i think you started teaching when i was just a newborn yes [Laughter] yeah that's about right i don't i don't mean to give away your age either see this doesn't mean the non-disclosure here on both sides because because it really wasn't but um but um the tremendous amount of of wisdom and knowledge and expertise that you bring to the field from the from the scientific realm which is really your your home which is which is the cognitive science i feel that in some way i have um i don't want to say a comparable but but an equivalent intimacy with my own tradition of jewish mysticism which i began to learn in the original tongue in the original text from the age of 13 um beginning with memorizing these things by heart and then really trying to really try to understand these things deeply and philosophically um and and i think and i think that the the capacity for for these ideas to to lead to a life a life of of goodness of bliss of inner peace and silence of harmony of of love for one another instead of jealousy for one another and i think i think it's so rich and important and unmissable and i think that and this this and and i think that my unique contribution may be to bring the hasidic voice and to bring the jewish voice of jewish mysticism which and we can get into the the history of this but has been so often neglected in the comparative academic study of mysticism in general for very specific reasons related to gersh and charms characterization of union mystica or the lack thereof and jewish mysticism but for whatever the historical reasons there's a real need to to to bring a perennialist jewish voice back into the conversation and i use that word tentatively carefully because because as we discussed last time um and that's and that's really where i see my my work primarily focused and and i think particularly here i mean just before we we started i i don't know if i want to mention this because i really try to stay away from politics because i think politics is fundamentally divisive and doesn't do anything good for humanity at all but um i mean i'm living here in a region which is filled with so much hatred and so much animosity which is just absolutely heartbreaking and i think the only way forward is to change that hatred and somehow somehow move to a place of love so i do a lot of work specifically focusing on sufi on the relationship historical and conceptual between between sufism and jewish mysticism and and many other areas like that i think that might be um that might be enough of an introduction um there was maybe one or two other points i wanted to mention but they'll come back to me so i mean um when you when you came to this realization um you know it sounds fairly shocking like because you were you were sort of grew up in a narrative of sort of this is where these mystical experiences are expressed or understood and then you discovered there's similarity um uh uh you know um in other religions and and philosophical traditions so i get the sense of how much of an epistemic shock that was for you like what kind of an existential shock was that for you like was your sense of identity called into question um like did that cause a rift between you and your community i mean i i don't want you to trespass on any confidentialities but i'm trying to get a sense of because my understand my my understanding and both my both my understanding my experiences uh we're not talking about even something like political beliefs and i agree with you about i think they put us at the wrong level and they put us in the wrong framework um that's why i have this slogan about stealing the culture um i agree with you so um but i think the the kind of things we're talking what you've been talking about what i talked about last time these are more foundational these are even at the political level these are at like the ontological existential you know your worldview cognitive cultural grammar level and so for me and i would i would i would hypothesize for most people because there's empirical evidence to support this when those are disrupted that's not just you know you're not just angry or frustrated or or you know even passionately so like we see in other you know ideological conflicts but it's it's more um well here here's uh you know a a sort of a guardian point uh you can come to the precipice of despair when you get this kind of epistemic shock uh that seems to uh you know portend and indicate the depth of what is happening the the level at which it's happening was that the case for you or um like how i guess i uh again i don't want you to spill your guts or anything but like how much of this has because i get a sense of an aspirational quality even in the title of your channel right and so i'm trying to piece those two existential moments together a little bit more yeah yeah that's a that's a really that's a really fascinating question and i hear your your therapeutic side coming at you which is what is really going to be on the receiving end of as well um you you pose a question with a lot of care and and uh and tenderness i well i needed i need to think back to that moment firstly it was it was it was it was it didn't happen overnight the way i'm narrativizing it now i'm telling it in 20 seconds it sounds very quick it really sort of germinated over a period of years probably a decade in full um and and and i and i left my intro i left my study of um let's let's frame it like this growing when you grow up religiously very religiously as as you know yourself fundamentalist christian home you're not given the choice of would you like to be religious or would you like to be something other than religious or which religion would you like to practice yeah yeah exactly and for good reason i mean i mean families that are raising children want to pass a month they believe is going to be the best chance their child to live a life of happiness and fulfillment and therefore they give them what they believe is the truth um and and i i i have uh i have only tremendous and infinite love and respect for my parents and for their parenting i could not have asked for a better childhood thank god from from here until until the end of days into high heaven um i i understand my parents are two of the most incredible people and inspiring people in my life and and that i know but for any child that grows up religiously there there's there's just there there isn't and particularly i don't know what it's like internally from the inside from another religion and christianity may be different because of how it's sort of become so pervasive culturally but with something like judaism and and i assume the same is for islam and and maybe for some other traditions too there is no religion in judaism when you are when you are raised religiously like orthodox or ultra orthodox that it is your life like it's it's not it's not like there's your life and then there's judaism yes yes it is your life um so and and that and that really happens i don't think one has the independence or cognitive capacity to really question that at all until until at least in early adolescence um and and i and it's it's not a bad thing i'm not saying that in a negative a pejorative way it was a very it was a very great childhood to grow up with the traditions and with the culture and with the the calendar and with you know the life cycle events it's really beautiful beautiful tradition uh which i still very heavily partake in i'm not speaking as if i'm some you know ex but what happens then when i think when one and in in in judaism at bar mitzvah 13 for for males and uh 12 for females there's a there's another like infusion of religious fervor and excitement you're on this like bar mitzvah high where like you're the mitzvah the jewish ritual commandments you do now begin to account for points like up until there was this practice and you're really riding on this high and particularly within the hasidic community you begin to get the language of torture which is jewish mysticism you begin to practice prayer as a form of religious experience and worship at least aspirationally so and it's a very it's a very strong period and and what happens for many what happened for me is as my own independence and my own cognitive abilities began to kick in you began to self-reflect and turn back on the mind and turn back into your practice be like one second why why am i doing all this why am i why am i putting on feeling why am i keeping question am i doing this because my community's doing it because my because my parents told me to and and i think i think that's a very natural period and and i think i never i never and some people in that period really go on a full swing rebellion and really just go and break everything and go you know dye their hair pink and get a tattoo which uh which happens i never did that i always was a very well-mannered always like a very well-risk like respecting child and but i began internally i went out i began to go on my own questioning and i began to look for ways that could that could make this practice meaningful for me myself and and beautifully enough that actually is encouraged within the city community to to take the religion and personalize it and not just do it because it's been taught for you to do it that way and the first place that i was turning to consciously to try to try to make sense of things was to the scholastic argumentative maimonidean um ergo aristotelian side of things and even even engaging in and listening to sort of christian apologists trying to really and going through like teleological and ontological and cosmological and fine-tuning arguments being like i really need to rationally make sense of this thing so i can really firmly believe it um and i guess that's also by my disposition i i want to i want to try and understand and grasp things rationally and that project not that i was talking about this with anyone it was very private project but it was really failing for me and yeah and with with discovering um you know kantian critiques of this kind of knowledge and and and the with the complexities of terms like like essence and existence which which you don't really get in medieval philosophy but with with sort of with with the brunt of modern philosophy that that project became more less and less tenable right um and and and and there was there wasn't i would say there was an internal loss of faith where where i was kind of keeping facade externally and keeping practice because i was belonging to community and i had my friendship circles but internally it was it was just crumbling it was really just anything to blow it over and two things happened simultaneously one of them i'm more at liberty to speak to and one of them i'll have to maybe wait till i'm i feel ready for it but but there was through discovering this comparative form of mysticism and through finding the at least at that point before i you know got more critical about it reading cats and reading that whole school of scholarship finding what i assumed was a universal truth that pointed to something which which i could really believe in and something which was which which in many ways was so beautiful and which i felt to be not other than my tradition but the core of my tradition right um in a way that was that was vivifying and inspiring for me in a way that didn't need me to reject anyone else in that process and the universality of that a lot of people when they when they go into comparative religion it destroys their own faith for me i had just the opposite my faith was already being destroyed it was discovering the the comparative element right in in mysticism that allowed me to rebuild my faith both both rationally because i think there's very good logical argumentation for mysticism and i've developed that case and we discussed last time a little and i did a two-hour uh segment with justin sledge who's a a great phd in philosophy who has his own channel here um esoterica um where we've really gone to the nuts and bolts of that debate and i think that physically there's a very good case to make as you make as well um scientifically and cognitive psychologically as as you and others are making it there's a great case but more than that i think that there's a really good case to be made aesthetically there's a real beauty there's real there's real poetic justice and resonance to it and and speaking about justice i think there's also a real ethical uh vision that emerges from it which which i think is is really incomparable in its power and beauty so it's on those three legs really that i began to rebuild my faith in humanity in a new conception of the divine and and letting go of of your old conception of the divine to embrace a new one may be the most difficult thing for a religious person to do because the divine by definition is the most important the most profound highest concept definitionally and and allowing the death of god and to discover the god beyond god as a phrase that you're um using is is a terrifying experience um and they're definitely i think that there definitely was a death and rebirth and i don't want to make it sound as if as if i've discovered it and i've made it and i'm now here at the top of the mountain no no no no no no lord like everyone else but it's a journey and it's a beautiful journey so to me maybe that answers your question a little no i think that was great um and i like the way you uh you invoke the true the good and the beautiful and the fact that uh not only are they being uh sort of separately revivified for you i get a sense that they were also there their potential integration and reunification was being revivified for you like you were like it could be i mean people have experiences where the true becomes more important to them or the beautiful or the good or perhaps even all three but it sounds like it wasn't just all three it was it was like like almost a neoplatonic right there just three different aspects of the same thing is that a fair is that a fair description yeah i think that's actually very accurately and beautifully put and i think perhaps earlier my journey when because i was transitioning from trying to find truth it may have been a truth factor which was more salient but i think as my journey has progressed and matured it's definitely become the fact that that those three things are are not separate at all then and we began to discuss this last summer i think that the the metaphysic and the ethnic and epistemology of mysticism are one um and there's there's a performative beauty to this theory because i think and and i think this is where we may fruitfully disagree i think there is actually a propositional value that emerges the truth emerges from this and and and at the very bare bones of that it is the the fundamental unity of all things the fundamental oneness of all reality and and that includes it's it's performatively beautiful because it includes that the internal structuring of the system itself that the the ethic the metaphysic the truth the beauty and the good themselves have to be one as well and i think i think that's demonstrated beautifully uh in in all aspects of of of the mystic system yeah i'm thinking here of uh hammermaster's response to the problem of modernity um arguing that we know we what modernity did was separate these into separate spheres autonomous normativities and that has turned out to be disastrous because we need them to function in some kind of tightly integrated manner but we've set up a system of justification and argumentation that prohibits that you can see him sort of wrestling with is there a way to bridge uh between that and part of his part i don't think it's succeed but part of what he's trying to do with his universal pragmatics is to try and go from performative criteria to ethical criteria uh which would then uh also bear upon you know our propositional statements etc um and so i think i think they're at least they're there is enough recognition at least of the problem of the separation of three normativities um uh although that hasn't led to in general i i don't remember seeing i know habermas has been recently considering religion and more of his uh but i don't know if mysticism per se has been discussed much as a potential uh field in which we could come up with answers and i mean more theoretical argumentative answers to how we could stitch those normativities back together that was something i wanted to talk about in um awakening for the meeting crisis but you can't talk about everything uh i'm hoping to talk a little bit more about that when i do after socrates about because the the suprem you see in plato and the fact that the ultimate is not the true but the good but also the one right and that he's basically doing this yes um um and and so i want to bring that into the the modern problematic of we need we we need to and you see and i there's people that are deeply influential in cognitive science like hillary putnam arguing for the breakdown of the packed value distinction uh that you know that hume used to cleave apart uh you know truth from goodness and things like that um and so i'm interested in in that movie i'm going to bring it into the after socrates discussion uh so that that brings me to something if oh did you want to ask a question or can i can i just interject on that point yeah um i i think that part of part of the problem of mysticism is that those three are so deeply interconnected into woven that in an attempt to try and articulate and express and present mysticism um in a way that's compelling and persuasive which is what i'm trying to do on my channel it's so difficult to to pass those things and separate because in language that's what you have to do and and that i think i think that that points to the fact of how deeply interconnected and independent and how one they are um but but but but i think there is a need to present mysticism in a way that is a a real possibility for a really rigorous thinking person in the 21st century and i think one of the reasons why someone like harry mass is not approaching this because there's still such a stigma against mysticism because because we're really just lacking there's there isn't even a consensus on a definition on the term yeah yeah i have an upcoming series which i want to work out which i want to do which is just defining mysticism be like this is all the definitions that have been given by the great scholars let's put them into five categories let's see like where their faults and strengths are let's see how those terms evolved ecologically historically um semantically because we it's a category and it's a way of thought which which which we so badly need to to repair um and and i think part of the challenge of doing that points to it to its value i think that's that's very good and very well said um and and we touched upon this a bit uh maybe we come back to it today you know on this uh the the anti-normativity which seems to be beyond good and evil but it's not just epistemic truth um and it somehow grounds all the kinds of knowing uh so i i do want to talk about that uh and maybe it's actually related to the question i want to ask you um so uh take this in the spirit of kindness uh because that's how it's offered uh so it's more it's more about trying to draw you out uh because this this is an argument that um you know i made implicitly and i'm gonna make it um explicitly i'm planning a third series after after socrates the god beyond god is going to be the title of it um and so many people in fact you could make an argument even exegetically but i'll just make it sort of more theoretically many people have argued that at the core of mysticism is some experience of non-duality um i don't like the word experience i'm going to use a word that i try to make more prevalent in the meaning crisis a realization of non-duality because it's yeah i think that's a better way of putting it much better yeah okay so there's the realization of non-duality and then um i would argue and i don't think i'd be alone in the argument i don't think i'd represent a consensus either but i don't think i'm like a voice crying in the wilderness or anything like that i think that um many people see that there's a deep connection uh between uh non-dualism and non-theism as a position that transcends the usual dichotomy uh between atheism and theism which seem to be bound into a set of propositions or presuppositions is perhaps stronger that i think are transcended and and i think at least retrospectively are critical of those shared presuppositions that the core of our spirituality is belief that the belief puts us into a relationship with some supreme being some super thing um that uh that what we should uh be primarily looking at is you know the evidence that will decide the undecidable debate between theism and atheism you know i i can go in more detail i'm just giving you the gist of the idea i think there's about five or six of these uh presuppositions but what i see i'm impressed by i'm impressed by the mystics often turning to language that is clearly and explicitly non-theistic plato's the good right platinus is the one uh eckhart's godhead right uh spinoza's got her nature i mean it's very hard to make that a a a theistic argument in fact that's one of the most interest i think that's one of the most telling things about spinoza people are will will yell up and down confidently that he's an atheist or he's a theist or as a pantheist which is a technique right um and so i think you can make the strong place that there's clearly um something in the non-duality experience that tends to be retrospectively tied to a non-theism that is seen as transcending the theism atheism debate i'm particularly interested in that because i think that might be relevant to um something you alluded to already which is a way of addressing the culture wars in a deep way um that i think could be potentially not only just intellectually satisfying but point people to ways of life and realizations that could genuinely transform them so that they're more compassionately disposed towards each other there's that and then i have you know then and i think this is convergent um with you know the argument that john hicks makes in the interpretation of religion in the fifth dimension where he says the the best interpretation to make of the perennial nature of the theism atheism debate is that the universe is in some sense spiritually ambiguous on this question that it it provides i think it's a great meta argument it provides enough evidence for both without enough evidence to determine the debate between either and then he argues for basically a kind of non-theism he says the really real can be we can relate to it personally but we can equally relate to it impersonally and of course that means uh you know he's basically thinking of it as transpersonal and so there's also a deep connection that's the third point of conversion uh convergence sorry um you've got sort of what i would say the mystical pointer and then you've got the sort of hixian type argument of the meta argument and then you've got this this argument that is basically saying well we're getting the rise um out of i you know the clinical therapeutic domain of you know of of the the category of the transpersonal which seems to supersede it it's intended to supersede the personal and the impersonal which also seems to be some of the underlying at least aristotelian grammar of the theism atheism debate and so i'm wondering what you think about all of that that was a bit of a i was trying to keep it brief but um and i'm not telling you well if you want to i'm not precluding you either but i'm not demanding from you or even requesting from you that you give me like your final definition of god or the sacred but i just want to know yeah just open resonance how do you respond how does that land for you that proposal that there seems to be you know across cultures across religions across different historical periods deep connections between the non-duality and and the non-theism yeah well that's that's uh that's a huge question it's like it's like the million dollar question and and i think that because it's such an important question it has to be approached so carefully and thankfully um oh sorry i hope i didn't come off as trying to be exhaustive or complete i was just trying to be gestural i'm just trying to give you some backgrounds no i and i i feel exactly toy you're gesturing um and um if i mean it helps to to explicate the question and to get it out there but but i i in in another parallel universe i could have stopped you five seconds in and said i know exactly what you're what you're saying what you and what you're and what you're getting at i think when it comes to to god and god language the language that we humans use to refer to the uh ultimate reality it's it's both such a such a stupid and trivial discussion and such an important discussion yeah it's it's it's stupid because there's there's a level of interaction with this discussion where people just want to hear uh just want to hear a category they want to throw you into it the atheist boss the theist box the ds book yeah and and and that's and that's and that's something which which is which is so stupid and i think for someone like that i'd rather not give any titles because they're not coming to chat to be challenged they're not coming to learn they're just coming to box people and and there's enough boxing in the world so but i think when we can open up these these labels and open up these terms and see what they might refer to and what those references might imply about reality see i think the real question is when we say when we say what is the nature of the divine or what nate what do you how do you characterize yourself i think what we're really asking is what is the nature of reality and yeah and how do you see reality itself yeah yeah and and and that's that's such an important question because because of that because the metaphysical and the ontological um convictions that we have about reality is what is what defines the way that we go ahead and and live our lives and make our decisions so the category of non-theism is a really is a really fantastic one and and i think um i may have actually heard you use it first and and the way that you use it i think it's so it's so spot-on and so precise um and i haven't heard of you being used much else which is which is a real shame but but the fact the mystics in their um either in their non-duality or in their in their unity point to something which is non-theistic is so blatantly clear i mean i mean the fact just just to open this up for for perhaps people who are less familiar with the with the history and literature mysticism mysticism um in the west there's a tradition known as a prophetic theology which is literally the non-saying the the opposite of character where we try to make positive statements all we can say is that god is not god is not god is not good and then the same idea not this not that um so there's a great book for anyone that's interested in michael sells on the language that i'm saying which really explodes excellent excellent really brilliant um so so the idea that whatever your conception of god is that is not god is like is like the basic premise there because god has got us beyond our own conceptions of of of whatever that thing is and and the problem is that that same word that same three-letter english word god for one person means something which is which is so ineffable and so sublime and so so demanding and so and so and a perpetual existential challenge to their very being and behavior and for another person it simply means some sort of patriarchal monarchical object um somewhere between here and saturn that is gonna that that likes one flavor of pizza and doesn't like the other end punishes one person and not the other and has you know picks who who wins and loses wars and and is going to roast people for all eternity if they if they don't believe in him exactly the way that they're so the there's a real tragedy and pulpacy in our language here yes when we're trying to describe two things that could not be more diametrically opposed to one another this is all on the theoretical and and i think for that reason having a category like non-theism is such an important one because it really what it says is is that this whole debate is is a pointless one because because it's really missing the point if you think that there is some you know rustling teapot objects out there that either can or can't or come can be disproven you you've missed the point entirely and they get like yeah that's this is all in on the theoretical and i want to move to the personal here yeah yeah on on the personal side of it one of one of my own biggest struggles which i alluded to um in when i was sharing before was precisely this idea of of of the god of theism that i was raised with the god of the bible and the god of rabbinic literature and the judaism and the god that i was finding in my own miss in the jewish mystics and in the mystics of the world seemed to me to be irreconcilable and and and and if there was any question that that literally gnawed at my soul and kept me up from nights on end it was this question um and and wherever i was whenever i met a wise person who who i felt like might have some insight uh be they a rabbi or a pastor a teacher a grandmother i would this was the question i would post them and and i sat down and i recorded these conversations i've hundreds of subscribations and one day i'll do something with them god willing but um it's a question which which drove which drove me crazy of like like this this this new god that i've discovered which is which is which is beyond which is the the non-theistic which is the is it seems so sublime and beautiful and compelling and challenging what do i do with this with this old god with with you know my childhood god yeah and and and i i still don't know if i've reconciled that issue and i'm in two minds about it um part of me part of me believes um part of me believes first initially i thought i had to just completely eradicate that god get rid of it and i became like a militant non-theist non-theists but then but and maybe in more maturity or in moments of softness i'm realizing that maybe there is space in one's life in moments um of of toughness where one can relate to to the personified god um and where where there's a god as a mother or father to cry to um there's a very complex discussion in hindu theology about the specific point about the relationship between the two um representations of god ishvara and brahman yeah there's a book from rudolph otto called mysticism east and west where he where he compares arishankar with with maestro eckhart and he compares his god which is deutsch and and and and uh and theo so god dave dustin the godhead and and ishmael brahman and he really and and and the point which which comes out of there is is not the point which is that it's like just obvious that the brahman that the ainsoft that that the that the one is is just the re is the real deal and the rest is just childish and yeah leave that for the grandmothers it's no it's that there's actually a real place for a divine personification that we understand to be a mosque of god and not the ultimate um and and and there's room to incorporate that into a complex theology in belt and shine so this is why i don't have a clear answer to this question do i neither do i uh but that's i i wonder can i i didn't want to interrupt you but and so you can pick this up as you wish uh so i see one one i don't know i think give me one second i think i have a cup somewhere here instead of drinking out of the bottle like a hole again okay there it will be we'll be it will be a little more dignified so i see and i see this in uh the new age movement and i think of the conic's book uh yeah you know uh nauseous i forget the title something like narcissism in the new age movement um and she shows how a lot of sort of new age ideas right now in various movies and popular media are just you know uh you know rehashing or representing or representing of uh of gnosticism and you know and narcissism is not a religion it's it's like fundamentalism it's a style of religiosity and it's heterogeneous like fundamentalism is um and so i i want that understood but nevertheless i mean and you know and and i think the most apt description of young is not christian as some of the current apologists my colleague uh john peterson has been arguing i think he's more properly described he seemed to self-describe as a gnostic and so uh and young seem to argue that it's the default spirituality of human beings i'm not quite sure about that i think hans jonas is is better that it's sort of an existential a mytho-poetic response to an existential entrapment and i've talked about this some of the talks i've given on gnosis but here the point i'm trying to make is okay once those book ons have proven properly set up a caveat for what i'm going to say nevertheless i could say i could say is one of the temptations that i think immediately can occur to people when they get even an inkling of this and i'll call it the narrative god and and the mystical godhead right the the theistic and the non-theistic presentations is a temptation to gnosticism because it gives a very ready answer for that well you know this thing here well this is the evil power or principality to quote saint paul right this is the demiurge right and this th this is the plenum the plenum right the plenum void and and and and and the reason why this seems so nasty and hostile and jealous and bloodthirsty is it's right etc etc and i you know and i see our culture as increasingly uh giving more and more language that sounds gnostic here's here's a i think a key piece of evidence to support my claim so what jules evans calls con spirituality uh the idea that there are these grand conspiracies and conspiracies of conspiracies that are somehow running the world right now these cabals and of course that kind of thinking almo has had as a terrific and i mean that the original sense of the word history of bloodshed and genocide attached to it so this this is not just sort of like you know believing you can talk to dolphins this is these this is a dangerous uh i'm not saying that all of the gnostics were like this i'm not saying that but i'm saying that it seems to me that there that the emerge that one of the temptations maybe that's the word i'm looking for of encountering that dichotomy and at least that the fact that it seems prima facie irreconcilable is a temptation to uh gnosticism and i don't i'm not which is not the same thing as gnosis but the temptation to narcissism and and and then there's a temptation there to a dangerous kind of con spirituality uh that is becoming more and more pervasive and it's seeping into the cultural political domain like there's you know there's you've probably heard the research that republicans and democrats are more afraid of each other than they are of foreign enemies which is a bizarre place for democracy to get to i mean that's a democracy at least on the verge of cultural civil war if not political civil war so i wonder if you confronted that temptation at all because i know you talk about uh narcissism here and there i've seen a couple of video titles at least um oh and and and if you did what like what response you had of it and if you didn't what do you think now about that connection because i know you have addressed the topic at least in in part so did that does that question make sense as a question yeah yeah yeah yes i i again again i i think i think i the question deeply resonated me like from from the very beginning right um agnosticism is something which which i have been fascinated by i've done work um on jung specifically i did a series looking at jung's relationship to jewish mysticism both uh textually historically and conceptually um um harold bloom's work sort of a poetic expression of narcissism has been very inspiring dame francis hates his work on narcissism her medicine so these things are all definitely um had their time to sit and maturate in my brain um i i i don't firstly what you're posing as a as a as a challenge as a threat is a very real one right and it'll enemy and a very and i think it i think to to sort of expand it a little and i think you'll agree with this and tell me tell me if you do because the divine represents the reality and the realm of the of that that that divine inhabits when we say that there is a a plenum or a godhead and a demiurge we're not just saying that there's an evil entity you know the god of the hebrew testament i think what am i saying go to the hebrew bible um which is evil what we're saying is that that this world which is which is the crew which is the creation of the demiurge this entire it's the two world mythology which you speak about that this world is fallen and corrupt and broken and shattered and and and even i mean even even platinus in his even though he's he's an anti-gnostic in many senses you see even in him the talk of matter as probation right um right corrects that i think proclass corrects that but yeah but i think that's definitely the case yes so so so i think i think that as as as we started earlier when we speak about god we're not we're never just speaking about god we're speaking about the entire that entire strata of reality that it's representing and and and to like furicate those two realities and say this one is bad and this one is good um leads leads to to it to a fragmented consciousness and psyche um and and i think i think jung was very well aware of this and i think that problem is all i'm just sort of compounding the problem then i'll get to what i think maybe my own personal response that's a good point i'm agreeing with it that's a good point i mean yeah okay so good so and and i think i think as well what you mentioned in terms of the american political scene where where i think that that that split reality which happens which happens sort of on the vertical we introduce into the horizontal where where it's us and them and they are the they are the evil they are the demonic they are the demolition and we are of the light we are of and uh so so i think i think i think that what happens horizontally happens vertically and vice versa i agree i agree i agree necessarily um and and so the danger there is huge now now to maybe answer the question i think that in my own personal journey there may have been some sort of um upset beca because the relationship with god particularly when it's a personal god right which which is the god that that most children are given when you're upset with it you're upset with it personally um and there may have been some that personal upset towards towards that that character that concept that narrative um i i never i was never really tempted to go down the the gnostic route of of of demonizing but it was always a question of how of do i abandon it do i salvage it can i work with it just does it need to be eradicated do that that was more of the question for me and i i wanted to say this actually part of the previous answer but but it's actually more relevant now i think part of the and this is this is my own conjecture i think i think part of the the genius of the jewish mystical tradition in addition to my passion for looking at the universality of mysticism i also really want to know what is each tradition what are the genius of each particular tradition yeah yeah degree in the impacts and that's and that that question is as important and as beautiful as the question of universality right uh and and and the two of them only strengthen one another so when i when i when i when i turn to the genius of jewish mysticism and i i break mysticism into experience theory and practice and i want to when so i'm asking what what the geniuses and practice something which which many have spoken about and i've spoken about about how it integrates um you know the spiritual with the mundane with material with everyday which which is not separate from what i'm about what i'm about to say in in the realm of theory but i think the genius in jewish theory is that that that there are many names for god uh in in the jewish tradition and that the catholics adopt but two prime names is is god the tetragrammaton the ineffable uh the the uk above k which which was only said by the high priest on the holy on the holy state of the year which which uh jews do not say um and most people who think they know how to pronounce it pronouncing it because they they've just you know romanized the uh latinized the word but so so there's that god the the tetragrammaton the the transcendence um which is and then and then there is god which is elokim and and that is god um as as manifest as in dwelling as and and there's there's sometimes there's there's a masculine feminine um process which is which is invoked there um and the kabbalists really have these two very strong categories and the relationship between uh what's pronounced as hawaiia to not say the word uh or shame just literally the name um and hawaiian alicum is a very is a very complex relationship and and the kabbalists go at great lengths and work first to establish what these two names mean and and how they're different and what their character and what their constitution is and and i think that when we speak about it when we speak about havayah we may we're speaking about or we're speaking about the non-theistic god and we speak about ali kim was speaking about the what's referred to in in kabbalah as the sabbath as the one who cr who creates the act of genesis one who who is the god in the bible what what the gnostics refer to as the demiurge uh literally that's the the demiurge is the builder the creator yeah yeah like that's what it is in plato he's not an evil figure in plato by anybody and the kabbalists say something which is which is radical after after spending tremendous amounts of time and effort to establish the independence and difference and character and uniqueness of these two characters they say that they come to say that based on the only real affirmation of faith that jews have which is undisputed because every other affirmation of faith really didn't go down well in jewish history um is shema israel hashem that list know israel which is what the 12 tribes say to the dying father whose name was israel but it's now taken to mean all of israel the people of israel the children of israel shema israel hashem eloquent listener israel uh translated in english as the lord of god the lord is one we're saying is that hawaii this god which is the non-theistic god this god which is the one this god which is the the god to be on god is eloquent is is that same god who is the personal god is the same god who creates is the same demolitical because the mystic must fundamentally unite these two things must become one and the work of the kabbalist is is to create unifications is to reunify often what's described very erotically and sexually is to reunify these two sides of the divine and in every action that a that a jew does with functioning within the kabbalistic system they're working to to create that union there there's a there's a there's a kabbalistic um incantation or or or or or blessing which you said before we make any um in certain communities before we do any religious practice which is the shame of that we do this uh in the in the in the merit of reuniting um the divine masculine and shrina and the divine the divine feminine that that indwells the this havayah now kim to to reunite the the the letters of god and to make a complete name and i think this notion sorry if this is if this is becoming a bit long technical please please no i think this theoretical notion of the of the need to recognize that there are two different modalities and two different relationships here in the way that we relate to them there is god which is the non-theistic and there is the god which is the demiurge the creator the one that interacts the theist um and and but those things are not separate um those those things are somehow fundamentally one uh in a in in perhaps a paradoxical way i i don't know if i'm i don't know if i'm articulating that clearly enough but that that i think is what the capitalists are trying to get at that's and and is it fair for me to conclude that that's also the position you are most sort of identifying with so it's it's a position which i it's a position which to be honest i'm i'm wanting to to to to believe in and read into the capitalistic system there will be people will disagree and say that that's not what the campus is doing and you're you're trying to reincorporate something but but to to to just extend it to the larger implications here i think that because the divine means the world of that divine as well when we say that those two are not other what we're saying as well is that that's that heaven and earth are not other than one another they are also must they must also be unified that um that nirvana and sasara are not other so i think i think that that's that challenge that statement um is is is the is the is the battle cry of the mystic um and i think what that means also horizontally is that is that we can no longer we can no longer other what we perceive to be the other because that that itself must be incorporated and unified in this divine oneness um so yes so that that's a very powerful and provocative answer um i'm i'm right now working my way i've i've i've worked my way through thomas chief's work and i've talked with thomas and now i'm sort of and along the way and i'm doing it more i'm working my way through corban um and corban's notion of the angel um um and i don't want to trespass into your area but he talks because he talks about it obviously within uh persian religiosity which is not just islam by the way he's also talking about zoroastrianism et cetera et cetera uh but he talks about this idea that uh of uh you know their the angel is the imaginal aspect um which is uh so uh again you know this better than i do and if i make a mistake you just jump on me and i i won't be offended but i'm thinking of things like you know where he talks about you know even in the in in the hebrew bible there's you know the angel of the lord or the angel of death and and somehow this is like an action of god but but it's also something that for which god bears responsibility like well who did this well it was god right right and he talks about the fact that there is this i guess the best way i've tried to talk about it i don't know if this is helpful there's this non-logical identity uh going on so that brings up something very interesting because there's two things that come out of that for me is a question and i have this ongoing discussion with you know jonathan pajot around this um which is uh because you invoke kevin on earth and he does a lot and he he takes a position which you can see in at least some strands of neoplatonism of seeing this hierarchical right right so the relationship between uh the godhead and the god is is a hierarchical one where the lower is in some sense subordinately in the language subordinate below uh the higher uh and of course uh they're they're there and there's a sort of proposition that reality is therefore itself inherently hierarchical uh because of that and you can see that in like i see a you know a classic reading of platinus as an emanation right and it's uh it's emanation all the way down and that's why platinus thought the bottom level was evil because it was so far so so much less so matter was evil for platinus and i think in a very problematic way um and so that's one thing that might come out of um of that you will you say well the way they are non-logically identical is because they're in a hierarchy that's one answer that has been given and i i i would i what i'm trying to do is sort of present that to you in a problematic way because i think there's a lot of problems around um that idea of i i think and you've probably heard me argue this i think the the ontology that i think is emerging within cognitive science in its discourse with science at large is simultaneously its emergence all the way up and emanation all all the way down and at no place right can you can you differentiate those um and i try to do this with the the radical imminence of the suchness of things and the radical transcendence of the moreness of things both both transcending our categories in both hands um so that's one thing uh one way in which granted let's say we put aside gnosticism uh but one way people have tried to interpret the non-logical identities hierarchically another one that is that i think seems also i want to present and problematize because i've talked a lot about it i've talked and i've been in dialogue with people about it several times paul vander clay and mary cohen and other people is people say well you know where we practice non-logical identity we practice it in personal identity right because i i will look at a picture of myself as a two-year-old and go there i am and that's not logical the categorical identity and narrative personal so persons within narrative and then they they make that argument that ultimately it folds back into the personal and the narrative is fundamental because that's the only place where we get the the the non-logical identity to make any sense to us and then you get hierarchy and the two are often put together you get you get personal narratives within hierarchy and it seems to me sorry this is a bit of a long setup but it seems to me and i've been trying to say it seems to me but developmentally that the deal logos precedes and makes possible um narrative right and that and that mysticism right and if you want to call this down here dialogue and this up here dear logos there's something that takes us beyond narrative that subverts narrative so that we can precisely so that we can enter into that the mystical version of non-logical identity that is inherently not hierarchical yes and inherently non-narrative yeah that was a long way but i i i guess i want to include you in and i want to get you into this discussion because this this this is sort of the meta discussion i'm having around the the ontology right right now i'm i'm so glad you you you pose that question um because it really is the logical follow-up to what we saw we just discussed um and all i can really do here is share the metaphysics of the mystical tradition which i know most intimately which is jewish mysticism with the advantage of having a bit of you know philosophical and comparative uh literacy as well um so firstly there's there's a question of the framing of reality that we're posing the question from that's that's that's ubiquitous in mystical traditions where from a certain perspective it will be true to say that god is not x um but from the other perspective it would be ludicrous to say that god is not x and we would have to and both of those both those are true based on which level of reality you're you're framing things on and and i think uh a a a conditional truth is is not a difficult thing in in any logical system or any everyday speech even so so so so that's so that's one point speaking then speaking more directly to the metaphysical point here of what you're referring to which uh arthur loved refers to the great chain of being yeah in a book that launches the entire field of um of history of ideas where he which is called the great shame being which is then taken up by by thinkers that are less academic ken wilbur has made a big deal of this yeah um not that i'm not trying to advocate for any particular thing here but but the notion but the notion that that almost every single mystical tradition um has some sort of hierarchy being to try and to to try and explain what they experienced which was a fundamental unity and the multiplicity of reality and to try and reconcile those two because they're because they're incompatible we must come up with some sort of great human being and at some point and the problem with all these chains of beings and and the capitalists spend more pages in this than almost anything else is that that must however however bigger changes there's always an intermediary level right there must be some point where you've gone from eliminator to emanation right yeah and for the catalyst does that happen in ketter does it happen in the essence of qatar does it happen in the upper essence of qatar this is like this is a never-ending debate um and and so so this is the attempted answer and it's it's neoplatonism it's it's the alienosis it's sufism it's christmas system it's everywhere um and and and eastern system as well they they have they have the same the same structures of reality um however within the metaphysics of jewish mysticism and other traditions there is there is language there's there's three modes by which this um hierarchy of being is supposed to be or okay or or perspectives on how it can be seen um and and that's very important because it makes it um non non-essential or non-non-exclusive and it becomes we we remember that it's that it's just the the finger pointing at the moon it's not the moon itself and therefore there must be different ways that it can be understood and deconstructed and whatnot and within the jewish mystical tradition we speak about three three modes of divine world relation through this great chain of being the first one is this the simple one which is the as you're saying there's there's the emanation this is called mali it's the it's light light is is as as much in in soothing persian it's almost really just the light the nor it's the it's the uh the the essence the the energy the flow the life force whatever it is the chi the light is far as is the term that count was used so the light that emanates from the divine uh a metaphor um which comes down to reality comes down in a straight row and and it goes back up and then so that that the chain up and down that's that's that's that's known literally there's it's the straight light um and that's that's one way and that's sort of what that means psychologically and cognitively is that that is the simple where down here at the bottom god is up there at the top and there is a continuum and we can we can ascend that jacob's ladder the next way that and that's that's also seen as masculine because it's phallic right oh right i hadn't thought about that right right yeah yes the the next wave the next way that we speak about the divine divine world interaction is is is seen by the catalyst is feminine because it's circular uh which means it's both uh of the womb and and vaginal in that sense which is our soviet it's it's the divine which surrounds um and and it's it's it's the it's it's it's um typically described as that which is too much to actually penetrate into the world but influences from from around it but what that does is that creates a cyclical arrangement here and it means it means that the top and bottom become really points of extremity along a circle and not along a not along a linear line and that's and these things get very extensively uh elaborated and the tablets describe really the the cosmogeny and the theology of this that there's actually this begins with a point which becomes a line becomes a plane which comes there's a very sophisticated geometrical theological psychological language around this but so we have we have the circle relational which which means that everything is equally distant from from the divine in some sense which is which is which is that the surrounding feminine which is which is fascinating and and that begins to deconstruct our simple linear conception of reality cosmos the next step which which mystics take jewish mystics and other mystics which really just shatter this whole thing to pieces is the notion of what's referred to as as xm or essence um which which mean which which means that that there's no there's no there's no up there's no down there's no circle there's no line there's no integration of the circle line so into a spiral there's only one thing and that is the essence that is the jude of god in islam and that is the only thing in existence and therefore there is nothing which is which is non-essential and there's nothing which is essential it's the absolute complete deconstruction of any category here right which which means that that that the top and the bottom these all become irrelevant because you can no longer have a top and bottom when you're speaking about essence it's the it's the infinitesimal point which is the everything which is the nothing and and and the essence collapses the whole system into an into a way where there's no longer the possibility of talking about a material world which is which is far from the divine becomes becomes um impossible and and and and in fact the way that the later mystics speak about it is that that actually in corporal reality we can see that we we can come to reveal the the unrevealable essence of god in the materiality of nature and and the language of essence becomes a very very becomes an explosive and dynamic theological and philosophical metaphysical principle for the jewish mystical tradition and i think the same thing happens that we spoke about this last time something happens in in late stage buddhism where i think over there the language is is is the inverse it's the non-essence but once you're at a point of essence or non-essence you you you know you're the same yeah so that's in response to the to the first point that you made that that but but the catalyst will constantly use these three even when they speak of the essence they'll switch back and speak about the straight line they'll speak about the round like this right and they'll be switching in and out of these metaphors based up based on what they need to do it's it's it's a very there's a real fluidity and flexibility in that it's like um the other point which i want to make was which was referring to what you said about about dialogues yeah um i'll in unless you should i go into that point or is that something you want to do no no no please please please go into that point so one of one of the one again another another earth shattering let me just open a window here okay one second just getting a little toasty thank you so another another earth-shattering um metaphysical construct that the kabbalists develop and this really takes its full development in 16th century um in the galilee by isaac luria who who in in kabulistic history very much like in jewish philosophy there's philosophy before and after one of these in kabbalah this vlog there's this cabal before and after lauria um so luria um based on earlier thinkers um it has its precedence in in the zohar and in in cardovara but he really brings this to it so it's full implications the notion of tsintsum which is notion which which which has become popular even outside of circles of jewish mysticism i've seen it even in some self-help books now and the notion of tsum tsum is is is this that god is the only god is the only thing that exists um and within god there arises desire to create a desire for to to relate desire to manifest different languages used by different thinkers but but to have that there must be some other which god can create or relate to or reveal to or be in relationship with and what god does is god um contracts god's self that's literally what seemed to lit some time is to to contract and god creates space for the for the illusion of otherness where in that space the the omnipresence of god and not just not just geographically but but but existentially and metaphysically is absent there because in the presence of that there can be nothing else so god has to create a space where where within god's self because that's the only thing there is there's a space for god to not know god's self for god this sounds like you're regina in a lot of ways yes uh very much so i i did i did i did a video recently and arigina and and the the parallels to to capitalistic thought are striking um it's i mean jacob burma is also another thinker who who yeah although there's a historical actual connection there where he is influenced um so so god creates space within god's self where god does not know god's self um to to and i'm flipping here between like the theological metaphysical and psychological language because it's really the old point and and and god does that to create a space for for for dear logos to have a space where where god can re-enter that space emerge as something new and and then re and then begin to to reflect to turn god's face back on itself this is also i think the new platonic idea of of the the nouns which is the image of god which is able to turn back and look at god yeah that the news is is that i think that party that turns back and looks yeah yes yes yes and and and so from in many ways for the catalyst and this is a really brutal thought we are we are that part of god which was created in that space which is able to not know god but look back and and try glimmer through the mystery to see ourselves um and and and really if you're looking for the place for the the profoundest expression of the spit of the creation of space for dialogues in the kabbalistic literature and and that becomes a psychological programmatic in our own lives of how do we create space for the others in our life to to allow them to to come into dialogue with us because if we fill our own full spaces there is no room for for the other to be to be to to love to be in relation to create to express yeah that's that's that scheme han makes a converging argument in the agony of eros uh in his critique of pornography uh because he says eros actually requires um a true recognition of otherness that can challenge you in a way that you cannot foresee or against which you cannot finally protect yourself whereas in you know in pornography you have what he calls the aesthetic of the smooth where things are are regarded as beautiful precisely because they in no way present the challenge of otherness they in no way distract or disturb our self our self-recognition and our self-grasping i thought that was a profound critique and it and i i bring that up because it shows how you know uh i think you could make a very uh i think han is actually alluding to it because he's ultimately making an ontological point i know this because of the scent of time right his uh all right in other books but you know how what's i mean some people might be listening and say who cares about all this arcane stuff but the point is right if you don't have an explicit uh account of uh of of realness you're you are very much gonna have an implicit one and it's gonna cash out in things like what we're seeing and han's critique how we have we have lost uh the capacity for genuine eros and beauty uh precisely because we have we do not understand uh the necessity of uh uh of otherness in order for proper self-transcendence and property logos um etc so i i i just wanted to point that out and that that leads me to another thing because and i i this is not a complaint oh you want to intervene go ahead let me so before we move to another thing let me let me just jump in on something you said there which is um there's one author on mysticism i'm on this quest to as i said to read every really good thing that's been read about myself and that's quite a bit um one of those authors is michelle de sartou who's a french philosopher postmodern historian um he and his his work is one of the only work semesters in which i opened up i'm like and this after reading many works from systems and i understand the field a little and when i opened up i'm like what the hell is he saying you read love for belle mystique which which is a i mean i i'm still gonna have to go back to it when i encounter a book like that i go back to like five years later i'm like oh okay now now i now um but he he he he makes this uh sort of this aphoristic statement he he categorizes all of eastern mysticism and all the western mysticism and i forgot what he's about the east but about the west he said and it really caught me off guard he said he said he said west's mysticism in one word is the necessity for otherness and in my mind i'm i'm thinking about unity oneness non-dua and and he says the necessity for otherness is is the essence of all western mysticism and and at the time i was appalled but sitting with it i'm like this is exactly his point and there's that the ontological and existential necessity to to discover ourselves necessitates the other uh and that's that's a profound profound point so thank you for saying that that's that's that i'd like i wanted i want uh i want your top 100 on your list of uh books uh i mean i've read quite a few myself i'm i'm interested in reading the the auto book that you uh referred to um but you know some recommendations uh xevi i would really appreciate pleasure so two things uh it it's it's what you you said about the kabbalist thing it i had this amazing conversation genuine and uh on theories of everything and kurt the moderator was just fantastic at you know moving between debate and deal logos and bernardo was just just an excellent companion i mean we disagreed and we argued but we also it but what was interesting is he described a metaphysics in some senses very similar although uh it didn't have the sense of normative necessity to it but he has the idea that reality is ultimately one consciousness he's explicitly a modest right and then he think but in order to explain all of this he has a theory of sort of something like psychological dissociation uh but it's again that somehow within it it's it's there's places where it doesn't know itself and it dissociates from itself i'm sorry i'm not trying to misrepresent or or present his view simplistically i'm just doing it for for sake of time but it strikes me it's interesting that somebody and i think rightly so who is regarded as sort of a champion of the revival of absolute idealism uh within the philosophy of mind and within you know you know you know theories of mind in general castrop is basically proposing something that has some remarkable similarities to the kabbalistic uh thing you were just the the kabbalistic movement you were just talking about and i think that's that's very interesting um i want to think about that i i'm sorry i just want to note it because it's there's something going on there i i find it fascinating that that something like this happens it happens to me all the time where where you'll be i'll i'll just be sort of explaining something in the depths of one own tradition and then someone coming from an entirely like left field place would be like yeah like i'm expanding the exact same metaphysic to to point of nuance which is so i was reading recently um randall starts which will be on the on that 100 list the unity of mystical traditions and get this in within the capitalist tradition there's a 2 300 year debate about how to understand this act of tim tsum whether it's to be read figuratively or literally and and and and the nuances in that debate i'm reading start still and the same thing is emerging and i think it was in like in bond mysticism in a form of like eastern mississippi where the exact same debates are being being discussed um about whether to understand their own form of of of occultation and concern of the divine and that process of disassociation or othering and and literally the same moves were being made in people that had absolutely no contact and that it blows my mind and i think there's a logical necessity that leads to this form of questioning but um yeah and i don't think anyone's gonna uh just sort of ridicule his ideas what's i think he's up to his fifth phd now what's what number is he on i don't know about that i know i know you i don't know i just know of two two were mentioned in the discussion uh but that's that's always amazing to see to see sort of an entirely different unrelated fields conceptually historically but the exact same the the the the the preciseness of nuance of the exact same debates that emerge and the same points that come out just keep pointing back to to how to how like fundamental this is and how really logical this whole structure is so i mean that brings me up to another point um because when i see things like that and i note them and and thank you for uh resonating with that and um so there's three responses although maybe they're just one response with different aspects one is part of me the cognitive scientist says wow whenever you find something like that like that those kind of universals you're looking there you're looking at the guts of cognition you're looking at the fundamentals of of intelligibility and then there's another part of me uh especially because i'm a 4e cognitive scientist says yeah but cognition isn't in the head intelligibility is a real relationship between cognition of the world there must be something in the world that's also fundamental and there must be something fundamental in the way the world and the and cognition fit together and so i've been trying to articulate that in in terms of in in terms i think are very convergent with what you've been arguing here so one of the things i'm taking away um what you call the divine i call sacred the sacred um i don't think there's much hangs on the difference there that's for me is for personal reasons the divine tends to connote personalities in a particular way right where i find the sacred a more neutral term um so and your your basic claim is you know that sacredness and realness are interdefining in in a profound way and i think i think it's fair to say i tried to argue something very very similar in awakening for the meeting crisis and some of the arguments i have going on um about you know that sacredness is a way of getting coming into relationship with the depth of reality and things like that um and then i tried to map that into um something that i i hadn't i don't want to sound so promotional but i hadn't i think this is at least autobiographically true i hadn't seen being done very much elsewhere i've seen seeds but the idea that our sense of realness doesn't come in a single channel of experience that our sense of realness is the conviction of our beliefs the sense of realness is the power of our skills and all of these have become i have at one time or another been taken as the you know the proper name for the sacred right um uh that it's also the presence uh within our prospective knowing and then ultimately that the sort of fittedness belongingness uh togetherness of of of participatory knowing and that all of those although theoretically i can do what i just did analytically in our cognitive i want to be i i even want to say our cognitive existential phenomenology they are interwoven uh together um i think we we've got a culture that has made us think that everything is reducible or or all that exists is the propositional but what i'm saying is that the sense of realness seems to be well maybe this will be a better metaphor it's multi-dimensional it's multi-dimensional in that when we're pointing to realness we're pointing to that which is found but not found uniquely in conviction right in power in presence and in fittedness um and the reason is because when you you can you can have phenomenological experiences and the existentialists are particularly helpful on this where realness is uh realness is undermined in only one of these channels but it's nevertheless profound um so uh for example presence we know from uh vr virtual reality research that this varies independent of very similar various similitude right you can have a very realistic virtual world and people don't feel it's real because they don't get that sense of presence uh that's important and perspectival uh you of course get all kinds of weird derealizations uh you know that can be pathological where where the participatory is lost um uh you know where people think that all of their loved ones are actually have been replaced by robots um even though everything nothing else has changed factually there's that sense of fittedness gets damaged in the brain and these are they'll leave it and there's other symptoms where syndromes where their own arm right is like this isn't my arm right it looks exactly like my arm and i can move it but it's not my arm there there's that um and of course we we have less pathological although not necessarily less dangerous versions in loneliness right when and in culture shock um and so that's where you can see the sense of realness disappearing at the participatory level the perspectival level the procedural level of course we all know this when we feel very inept um think of something like although it is conflated with some of the other but even like social awkwardness and we we get right we fee we we feel disempowered or futile so one of the ways of making people feel that their existence is becoming unreal is if they're procedurally inept they their actions are futile and then of course at the level of you know conviction and coherence we know that right if things don't hang together well for people they also that can be undermining of their sense of realness and cognitive dissonances fascinating and all that evidence sorry that was a long thing but what i'm trying to say is right i think i am in agreement with you about sacredness and realness and the multi-dimensionality of realness is something that i'm trying to unpack in terms of its phenomenology and functionality but i'm wondering i'm sorry this is mostly metaphorical to pose this question is the mystical experience like something in which you know the the the space-time continuum of the four-dimensionalities of realness is disclosed to the person do you know what i'm trying to get at uh that that though because although we can in analysis and even in experience you know the dimensions can come apart from each other fundamental fundamentally right it doesn't make sense that reality that these are separate realities or anything like that right yes sorry this is a very clumsy i i'm being procedurally inept here but i'm trying to get at like i'm trying to get at what i'm trying to move this into cognitive science and and i'm not trying to reduce it to cognitive science okay very clear but i'm trying to get in like what would that mean cognitively like i i can see these different different what i call the four ways of knowing and and they and analytically and experientially they get pulled apart but i also see that there's some phenomenological functional continuum of them and i'm wondering if the mystical experience might be a disclosure of that in some way that's independent from some of the other arguments i have about other higher states of consciousness it's a question that's just forming in my mind right now yeah so so i see that you're gesturing towards the questions i'll try gesture towards an answer that's completely fair that's completely fair so so let's let's begin with this i i think i think firstly the question of what is the real is is such an important question um potentially the most important question um and the answer to which we give as individuals and civilizations is so determining um of everything that flows from that um and and i think some of the things that you mentioned have their place historically and we we know the echoes of those things so for for for both for someone like hegel where the rational is the real and for someone like aristotle whether the active intellect is the real is the um for someone for someone and i think i think where this also meets with the political and the social and the social is that is that when we speak about my other fascination which is the the deification of the human right means the human becoming the real right that's what that's what the future means yeah yeah so so based on what you think the real is that's what will mean to become that so in so many ancient civilizations the it was the emperor the pharaoh the who who became the god who became deified and that what that is that not only is a deification of the individual it's a defeation of power because it is the power that makes them makes them god and and and that sets up a pyramid structure of society where is the powerful who are the closest to the real and and and the peasants on the bottom who who are in this who are dispensable because they're they're far from the real in that hierarchy being and and i think i think i think that so i think this question is so important what i see emerging from within sort of moving from to speak of my own tradition moving from the prophetic message into the jewish messianic jewish mystical message which i think deeply connected both phenomenologically and conceptually and historically is that the prophet comes to tell the people that is it that against i think that the predominant theory is that the power is the real um which which i think in today's world also has a lot of purchase with what are we real today is it is it is it status is it celebrity is it money is it is it social media influence what is what is the real what is the god of of these days exactly exactly have you seen that tv show called um american gods where where as something as something becomes more salient in the public's mind the mythological character bursts into yeah and they sort of battle with each other and the new gods come so you can imagine like the god of tic-tock taking down the god of youtube um but but this but this really happens in in in a very meaningful sense historically so i think for the prophets and the jewish mystics they're fighting against the god of power and an association of the real with the powerful and i think what they promote instead is a argumentation and this is still gesturing towards an answer i don't think this is yet answering your question they they they argue that it is kindness and and love and concern which is the real and it's in those both phenomenologically that when we're in an act of service and kindness to the other is when we feel most fulfilled the most present and most alive and most real ourselves and and and to be god is to imitate god in matatoday which means that and this is explicit from the talmud all the way through that that just as god is merciful so too shall shall you be just as kind just as forgiving and then this is this is repeated in islamic literature takes a shoot against a bunch of christian literature so so firstly the notion of of identifying of again of co-identifying the real with the divine with the aspiration of the human both individually and sociologically and societally um and and and allows us to to to frame our our goals and directions and and i think and i think that's perhaps why in last conversation i i kept trying to um to to wedge into what in in your domain becomes more of a i think a a supremacy of of some some extended form of cognition realization to insert there in the necessity of the ethical of the loving of the kind caring um and i think that that's it's true phenomenologically um as as much as it's true metaphysically so the question then is is there a convergence of these of these modes is there a place where where where the realness of of love of of power of of presence of knowledge converge into into one space um and i i don't know like it's a really really great question my intuition is is that the mystical uh realization that then experience is is not a monolithic thing it is every the human brain is so complex there's so many ways that it instantiates and manifests and appears and and and and we become conscious of it that i that that to say that there's only one um form i i don't like the the sort of the the facile typologies that were done by people like stace and and zayn yeah that's i think it's a waste of time but but to really begin to explore on a phenomenological and on a cognitive and on a scientific level what what what is the texture of that experience and what is becoming real for the your life experience and and inactively what is in in the transformative mystical experience which which is a phrase which is so important which you stress so much going forward in life what what does it compel one to be more real in is also indicative of what was real in that experience for me yeah um so so i don't have an answer to that question but my intuition is that that it's multi-varied and complex and there's elements of one another and then maybe sort of a space where they do converge and that and that may be some sort of i i don't like this this game of of of better and worse ultimate and lesser mis it's it's it's not a great game and uh when it's done there's there's an agenda to promote once one sort of thing over the other so i try to avoid that but but it's but it's but it's it's it's a fascinating question and that's my gesturing towards an answer no thank you for that and and and if i i didn't pay enough attention i didn't take enough care around a potential side effect that was not intended and i was not trying to create some simplistic or reductionist taxonomy what i was trying to get at is something else you know it's work i'm doing well the work i've already been done but and also it just emerged for me in this in this dialogue right but you know on a theory of understanding and one of the distinctions between knowledge and understanding is knowledge is evidence that justifies your claims where knowledge is your ability to grasp significance so you can apply it to your problems or or you know problems very broadly control and so this is a distinction that's sort of emerged separately uh within the philosophy of science and in the psychology of uh explanation understanding but they're converging together um and one of the one of the criticisms i've made of my own theory cognitive scientific theory of wisdom is that it didn't have a proper theory of understanding within it so i've been trying to think about understanding now what you know and one of the great privileges i have is i get to try out ideas on my students and they give me feedback um and one of the things they like when i when i make the and this distinction was also made independently by monica or delta as a psychologist and making use of the psychological work of john keeks the distinction between what he calls uh descriptive and interpretive knowledge but it's basically the description between knowledge and understanding and if you ask people in general you know what is wisdom more about knowledge or understanding they will almost universally say understanding it has a lot more to do with understanding than knowledge yes and i think that has to do with you know the stuff i've argued elsewhere about it being an enhancement of our capacity for relevance realization etc but then when i when i've talked about this and i i proposed this idea and i said like so it is it is you know the original meaning of proposition is to propose right i propose this idea that when we're talking about understanding we can talk about you know grasping the significance within a particular kind of knowing like you know i understand acts if i grasp its you know implications as a proposition that's a standard definition by the way of understanding um and you know and then we talk about you know you really understand a skill if you can transfer it to a new situation this is important in the martial arts can you take it from the dojo onto the street then you really get it then you really get it right so you can see that there's a kind of understanding that has to do within each kind of knowing but then i said what but isn't there the case that there's a kind of understanding that's between all the kinds of knowing so that you grasp the significance of your participatory knowing for your perspectival knowing and your perspectival knowing for your proposition you get you basically get a positive manifold of the grasping of the significance and when i propose that idea their eyes light up they all go yeah and that's and they say they they almost they they say like no that's not proof of anything other than you know the intelligibility of the idea right but but but they but they and they all they almost always say yeah and that's what the wise person has the wise person doesn't have the individual ones they probably have that to some degree but they have the manifold the manifold understanding where you know they grasp their significance not only within the kinds of knowing but even more importantly between the kinds of knowing and so and you know the experiment i i ran in in my lab on mystical experience and meaning in life showed that it was the insight component of the mystical experience that was doing most of the heavy lifting in contributing to the meaning of life yes um and you know and insight is you know an improvement in understanding in insight you're changing relevance not evidence right uh typically right yeah and you're making new connections and so that's that's the basis of my question like it seems like you know i've got at least empirical evidence that the insight component of mystical experience is contributing a lot to the enhanced transformative potential the meaning and life potential and then insight seems to be you know a powerful kind of of understanding and the deepest kind of understanding this is very much a circumstantial argument and i'm aware of that so it's an argument more just i'm just trying to share my thinking with you i'm trying to say you know mysticism seems to be the most at least i have empirical evidence that seems to be the profoundest kinds of uh insight the profoundest kind of enhancement of understanding and then independently over here it's not great evidence but it's at least the beginnings of anecdotal evidence right that you know the deepest kind of understanding is this manifold understanding and people are willing to they seem to be pretty universal in saying that's the kind of understanding that the wise person has and this is what i'm trying to get at the argument i wasn't trying and i don't want to try and reduce it all or anything like that i'm trying to get at right is there is the okay i'll weaken my question then because i think your critique is valid um could at least a cognitive dimension of mystical experience be an insight a powerful insight of a very strong manifold a kind of multi-dimensional unity between kinds of knowing that brings a profound kind of understanding that would be deeply transformative individuals that's the that's the that's the hypothesis i want to now put forward so you gave me a chance to revise it because you made a good critique and now that's what that that's what i'm what i'm trying to inc get an inkling towards yeah yeah it's it's it's a really it's a really really it's a very like pinpointed question i i want to begin by saying um based on something which you said which is that there's the correlation between an idea which also emerges from the jewish tradition very strongly that there's a strong correlation and necessary correlation between wisdom and humility yeah yeah i want to have the humility to say that that most of my thinking is not in this space of epistemology even writ lodge and my thinking is much more um religious and metaphysical so so so i want to i want to begin by saying that that i i'm i it's a pleasure to engage with this thinking with you but i'm i'm i'm like punching beyond my weight and out of my space here which is fun which is good but but just as as a as a as a humidity i hope i'm not being discourteous to you i i didn't i i don't want to be i don't want to put you at any kind of disadvantage that's not no no no no it's it's it's it's great to it's great to have that challenge to think anything beyond my own areas of comfort and i appreciate the challenge thank you um so to to share perhaps um i i wanna i wanna just i wanna comment on on both the phenomenological side of of the meaningfulness of that insight about insight and also on on a on a theoretical side again i'll bring in the jewish mystical theoretical perspective which is what i have to share so and i'll do i'll do i'll give the jewish side first within the with within the center um conceptual upper apparatus of the jewish mystical system is the spherot which which which i think for you would be very fascinating in the way that it's framed particularly by by the hasidic tradition which is that the spherot simultaneously is the shape the morphology of of of of three things of the psyche of of the world or reality and of god and three things simultaneously right um and and and and the spirit are our ten um are 10 things 10 attributes 10 modalities 10 energy whatever however translate there's no definitive translation um and and and and and because they map all three i think that's very resonant with your thinking that it is what's happening in which is what's happening now which is happening it's that three-way direction and and it's sort of really a map for that so with that introduction the first the threat are divided uh into two horizontally and vertically yeah um there's also different there's there's the spheroid based on we said earlier that there's that there's there's the divine straight light on the street this rotten circle and then this throat which combine the two which is the tree of life formation which everyone knows and right right and that's that's basically the crystalline structure that emerges from the initial first shattering of this periodic instantiation which then these are all very like very very rich and difficult uh metaphors but all which are very very important meaning which which which i'm working to to expound so in in the in the um crystalline uh tree structure of this throughout the the surrounding divided into left right and center um masculine feminine and integration um and and and there's also top middle and bottom right um bottom is is expression or speech middle is um is is is f is is feeling is is is internally processed of our own emotions and the top three are the uh the cognitive the intellectual the the the motion that the literally the brain of of the divine you know the god of mind the god of man and the god of the world um and the first three surat not counting quetta which which is sort of beyond this threat is is um and i know these are terms that you're familiar with because you do discuss data particularly in your in your series um but but to give to give sort of i i have a one hour class on each of these but to give a two second definition um i do recommend if you want to learn more for the audience and and if we're else interested please do check that out but uh in one word is inside it's that flash of inspiration it's the you're walking through the darkness of the forest and you see nothing and then a lightning comes and for a second everything is illuminated right for a second and and it's the yod it's it's it's literally the point it's the small infinitesimal uh bina is is the hey it's the expansion it's the feminine it's it's the womb it's where we begin to take the seed of and give it limbs and give it shape and give it a dimension and analyze it it's analysis it's it's it's the it's the ability to think about past and future which doesn't exist in that in that flash that's being a dot as as i assume you know but for the for the audience listening dot is is is is the integration of both of these two yeah and channeling it into the being it's the embodiment it's it's moving into emotions it's when you feel it in your tishkis that anthropomorphically is put by the neck because it's it's also the bottleneck of things that that stay in your mind that don't get into your body into your heart is because they don't pass oh that's interesting yeah they're they're literally constrained by the neck pharaoh all the villains in in the torah are associated with the different psychological sort of uh challenging melees and pharaoh is the neck pharaoh is the one who who stops those things from coming down really well yes um but so but but the point which i wanted to get to was a very elaborate introduction is that part of the complexity of this foreign structure is that each of these are within each of this rod so you have which are the interrelationship between those points so so it's not just it's not just it's not just understanding it's not just internalization really it's interrelativity between them um and and there's there's one um a bit longer than a month in the jewish year which actually going through now which is the counting of the omar the spirot which is 49 days it's seven times seven where we well every single day we we look at one of those things and one day we look at us and then the next week is the week of bina beginning with bina and we do that whole process wow so so that with that sort of without getting into any specifics just pointing the direction of of that same thought being explicated by jewish kabbalists hundreds of years ago which which may professing to if you'd like to look into that that is that is very fascinating that's very cool well you've i i mean through both of my discussions you've really piqued my interest in kevin uh it's it's uh and like i said i i at some point uh i would like to have a discussion with you about the connections between we alluded to it but maybe more full-blown discussion i'll take a look at the video first of course you know the connections between spinoza and yeah yes joseph for me is such a pivotal figure and and maybe we could come back and uh have uh more of a discussion about uh spinoza in this context because i see spinoza as wrestling spinoza is very much a heroic figure for me uh from for one thing he's socratic in that his philosophy is not just uh theoretical it is transformative he's he's like socrates he's aspiring to a blessed life the life of blessedness right the best possible life for a human being um it's it's it's philosophy in the sense of pierre haddow and uh and he's personally courageous and heroic the way socrates was yes uh even his enemies had to admit that he was a virtuous uh virtuous virtuous individual so they're that's so whereas i find people like madness distasteful i don't like to pay attention to liveness as a person independent from yeah right because the fact that he used under the bus is one of his favorite sins uh to my mind uh that's that's all aside okay but spinoza for me so he's he's a good choice but he's also an exemplary figure precisely because he recapitulates within the heart of the scientific revolution he's a he's a you know he's i think it's better to call him a disciple of descartes he of course is a significant innovator but he is cartesian through and through in in many ways in the heart of the scientific revolution he is right he's basically taking up the ancient project of the good life and he's trying to put it back into what i think you could i think reasonable given his own ontology you could call a naturalistic framework um um and so he to me stands as and i'm glad he's going through a revival right now because he stands for me and each one of these is contentious you know this anything you say about spinoza's like anything you say about jesus of nazareth or socrates you're going to get 10 people disagreeing with you right but for me he stands as the epitome of somebody who within a naturalistic framework is still nevertheless proposing something deeply continuous with the entire socratic neoplatonic tradition and there's even a mystical component as you've argued and i agree with that argument and he's doing that within the scientific revolution within the naturalistic framework i think he's also proposing um uh i would argue a kind of non-theism as an alternative uh because he was seeking to get beyond um you know as many people were at the time uh you know there's just they're still living in the rain shadow of the religious wars and they're trying to get beyond that and that's clearly on spinoza's mind um and so for me he's he's an exemplary figure to go back to and look at uh because of the promise he holds for giving us some significant clues on how we right now where we're at sort of maybe at the other end of the scientific revolution it's sort of coming to a you know it's it's now become the established world of use can we can we look at spinoza as a way of helping to wake up from that the ways in which that world view is ontologically and existentially um and and and as you rightly point out ethically and aesthetically um insufficient and inaccurate and i think spinoza holds out the real possibility that somebody could be deeply rational deeply mystical deeply naturalistic uh deeply etc etc etc um and i know you've done quite a bit of work on spinoza and so maybe we could at some point have an extended discussion around that sort of spinoza in the light of the meaning crisis might be the way yeah i'd like to talk about it yeah i i i would love to have that conversation um spinoza for me is a hero as well um and for i and i i do i relate to him uh in many ways personally someone who who also grew up in a in a restrictive jewish community um someone who also was challenged himself to think independently someone who who was also an autoduct um yeah there there are many there are many points just on a simple narrative level which which i feel very uh much a kindred spirit with him not to compare myself to it to a man of that stature but um i that's that's definitely something which great conversation i just i just wanted to there was there was on the previous question there was there was two points which i wanted to cover which i only only did one which was the theoretical the other one is the phenomenological oh um please if yeah if you'd allow me if you'd allow me this and and this is something which which um which which i feel there's like a rubbing up against your theory in general yeah um which i know that you appreciate so so i'll share that um but but but i i i would love to i would love to talk about spinners i i really would not that i think that's nose is huge exemplary inaudible yeah yeah exactly exactly and he's exemplary also within the very specific nexus yeah the emergence of the scientific revolution yes yes yes absolutely absolutely um in terms of in terms of the the phenomenology of the meaning that emerges from the mystical experience which which you at least now are postulating that it emerges from some form of uh understanding of the i don't know i don't want to actually um straw man or misrepresent your position and you just said so i'm not gonna i'm not gonna try to repeat it but but from from how i understood it it's something which happens there's there's there's an internal cognizing where the where the human sees their own internal structure thinking and how that is reflective and and co-creating and coaching to the to the reality out there and that and that that that itself is is the meaning generating apparatus um my my feeling through listening through all of your lectures um in addition to in addition to all the good feelings of of learning and being challenged um was was that from my own reading of of the literature mysticism which means both the mystics themselves describing their experiences that means both historically and contemporaneously people because it continues to happen and reading the the analysis of it from um from from from scholars that are looking to study in philosophies and and reading the the the theoreticians within the traditions themselves if you had if you if you would ask me what phenomenologically because because the fact that people come from that experience and and they describe it as inherently meaningful is is is a synchronous that's that's that's given if you have to ask me what is it that is causing it to say that i would not have jumped to your conclusion i would have said something different um i i would have and i'm not sure exactly how to articulate it but maybe together yeah yeah yeah i i i think and this is something that you that you yourself mentioned mentioned as well but but i think i think is under stressed which is which is that there's there's a sense of the inherent um rightness and place and i don't want to use the word order but but um but that that that things as they are are good there's who's the who's there's a christian uh female mystery who says do you have knowledge of joe and watch all is well and all shall be well is what she comes to experience knowing um and it's it's that deep sense of knowing that all is well that that it it's all good it's all okay the sense and i think this is integrated into what you discuss from from from who's at salaciously the the poem from from eckhart where where there's there's this non-natively logical mode of being which is me for itself it's the it's the blessing of the flower which blesses because it does which i think you said you correlate with the expansion of the universe and and that i think itself is meaningful because it it collapses the distinction between means and ends where where our our means and our present self becomes the end and the the the the act of being itself becomes a meaningful thing to do and and for me when i think about that it's much more grounded in in in the body not to say that that that for e is not is not in body but but if this is really in in the being of the body for me at least it's it's in moments of of of intimacy of of intimacy in worship in in erotic intimacy in in intimacy with nature where where one is sitting and and releases all of their narratives of self and all of their and it allows themselves to i i'm i'm sort of grappling with poetry here because i don't know how to express this non-poetic oh no it's fair it's fair it's good um kind of very clear and and for me that's for me that's that's not something that happens cognitively even cognitive writ lodge even even the way that it's something which is which is much more fully ontological and i know that you say that the cognitive is the oncological but this is like to me i don't know why i keep like pushing up against this but it's so it's so much more it's it's it's it's the very the trouble is that anywhere which i'm going to say is a word which you've already sort of co-opted like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah but but but it's in the kishkas of of the individual where where where where everything is and is perfect and it's beautiful and it's yeah that's that's the most i could do for it well that's good i mean and we touched on this last time yes so but i i get the sense that although uh you're responsive to the answer you found my answer still insufficient you're still rubbing up against it so i'll just recapitulate what i said maybe as a way of trying to get what's like helping you to refine where you want so i said like when i say cognition i'm not talking about cognition i'm not talking about computation in the brain i'm talking about like your full body is involved the participatory knowing the way you're enacting embedded in the world right and so uh you know and you acknowledge this is deeply embodied this is deeply embedded there's deep continuity between my cognition and my biology all of this i i argued before explicitly so yeah and so when i'm taught and when i'm talking about the manifold i'm talking about that i'm talking about something that's going to like you know it's going to link into uh you know it's going to leak downward towards you know the biological principles that are running the individual cells and then upward into or or outward and upward into you know the the ligaments and sinews of your world view that by which you're getting your sort of fundamental prince patterns of intelligibility that's and that's what i'm talking about but you want you want to say um sorry i'm not trying to box you and i'm just trying to make clear uh what i'm saying so but and i do think and i do talk about reciprocal opening that it's it's co-created by by the world and us it's not it's like i resist both empiricism inward and romanticism outward um so i'm definitely not a romantic saying we're projecting a meaning onto the world and i'm definitely not an empiricist saying we're just simply consuming it uh but i take it that you think there's there there's some and i'm sympathetic to this here's why i'm sympathetic to what i hear what i think i hear him you say like again this sense of autonomy the sense that people find realness inherently valuable in a way that transcends aesthetic epistemic and moral value and that they are willing to and onto normativity they are willing to totally transform their existence to to get to conform to this because it in itself is somehow intrinsically and the word the word is not quite right it's good but in plato's sense of the good right it's not good in our current moral or or consumatory sense of good yes am i getting closer to yeah yeah let me let me let me let me let me maybe point like fraser as in a more pointed way to use something which is not quite um esoteric or transcendent as a transformative experience something which is more mundane which is more relatable i think in in a moment of of um let's say loving sexual intimacy right which is which experience which many people know where there's a sense that that this moment is like the only thing that matters in existence and if this went on forever that would be fine and if all the existence was just for this moment that would be that would that would be sufficient particularly in a deep um sort of in a deep interperson is is that is that is that a space that i can conjure that you agree with totally and i mean if you remember the series i explicitly talk about this as the final moment that ultimately stoicism sits on that point of joy where joy is not pleasure but exactly that moment where you say if i live forever or i die tomorrow it doesn't there's no difference yes that's exactly the point yes okay so then let me ask you then in would you describe that experience as a cognitive experience the way that you're using cognition yes okay because i i think that what your ultimate well sorry i'll be very careful here i think cognition is ultimately about connectedness and uh seeking a kind of optimality in that and and i think that that doesn't have to just be and i explicitly argue this in my argument for higher states of consciousness it doesn't have to be this moment of connectedness or this but connectedness per se can reach an optimal state and people get variations on a continuum the flow state those moments and for me that is at the core of what it is to be a cognitive being is to get is to couple to reality in that way okay i i guess then i'm going to have to keep trying to work to familiarize myself with your language and the way you're using these words because at this point then i feel like it's just sort of a semantic or linguistic blockage which is which is coming out for me it could it could be or or maybe and and i welcome that because that'd be great because it's great when friends to realize that they're not actually in disagreement um but it could be also a friendly disagreement it could be that at some point maybe this is i hm i don't know i might be putting words into your mouth and i apologize ahead of time um i think that's an experience that requires a cognitive agent like that that that that that that moment you point to wouldn't exist without sentient cognitive agents so that that i agree with 100 percent okay okay because yes okay okay but but but let me it's it's funny actually this is this is a bit personal but this morning i woke up i was staying in bed and i was thinking about my day kind of like thinking about and i and i was looking forward to the end of the day which is now for it's night outside and i was looking forward to talking with you and i was thinking i was running through my head about the conversation we had and and and as as one does and enjoyably so and and i thought to myself let me try and sort of um take on or embody john's form of of of of reaching towards on his own he's continuing towards the transcendent transforming experience and and at least maybe the way i understand it i began to sort of move towards what i some sort of phenomenology of a flow experience and in my mind that was that was the wrong like existential posture to be moving towards i'm sitting in better if i want to move towards what how i conceptualize a transformative mystical experience not that i planned on getting there you know at 7am but at least to like be in that space to stop my day on it on a good foot it's it had nothing in my mind to do with the flow state and and to any of that language around it in my mind i had to just do with simply trying to be silent and trying to be as bizarre as that mysterious word is to to be in my body to be present to be there was there was nothing flowy about it and there was nothing there was nothing it didn't seem to it didn't seem to move on to that continuum as you phase that and that's just a personal anecdotal reflection that yeah well i mean i i think we should maybe draw this to close we've been two hours and um that's usually much beyond what i do on voices with verviki um i think that's a valuable point um i try to make it uh that um i like let me let me try and give you a quick analogy um and this is work i'm publishing with dan chappie because it i think it's it's of the it's of the same genus of the problem you're posing okay so remember we talked about vr a sense of presence yes and you're invoking something like a sense of presence in what you're just describing there so i think that that's fair okay and so a proposal of how they get uh vr one of my my students uh uh gary avahannasen has actually proposed that what gives people a sense of presence in virtual reality is the flow state and that seems very plausible because it's not very similar to like people can can get into the flow state they get a sense of presence with tetris which is like what they're not that doesn't look like the world at all okay now that's very plausible and it's a good paper and i think it points to an important thing but here's the thing and this is the problem that dan and i dan chappie and i are wrestling they're scientists who use the rovers on mars get a sense of being on mars as the rover and there's no way they can be getting into the flow state because of the time delay there's no joystick control all they're getting is batches of photos and they're using all this imagine where they imagine being the rover and they will actually enact the rover i don't know if you've seen it right and they're doing all of this stuff and there's no way it's the flow state but they're nevertheless getting presents okay and the argument i made was right it's not to think of the flow state like i i i get it the language of continuum is misleading because it sometimes just means more of right but the idea is fluency and insight in the flow state are all ways in which we are sort of expanding the scope of our optimal grip which it does not necessarily always translate into so what's happening is these scientists are not getting into the flow state but they're using their their their anthropomorphizing the rover and they're technomorphizing themselves so they get a participatory relationship and they even say weird magical things about it like they'll say things you know i was gardening and my right wrist got stuck and then i went and to the lab and spirit's right wheel was stuck and well i don't know there's some kind of weird sympathy and they laugh because they're scientists and they don't know what to do with that okay so i i'm just i'm not i'm not i'm not countenancing their their metaphysical claims i'm pointing to their there's a phenomenological experience and it's pronounced right and so it's clear it's not in the flow state but they're getting a kind they're getting a powerful sense of identification and it's effective it's it's a it's a distributed kind of optimal grip and what i was trying to get at now i think there are mystical experiences that are just enhanced flowy experiences i've had them you can get them in tai chi right you can definitely get them in tai chi right and so it's but i'm not trying to say that every mystical experience is like that but what i'm saying is mystical experience is kind of meta optimal grip it's an optimal grip on your optimal gripping and that doesn't have to be one that's requiring a serp you know you know a tremendous amount of metabolical metabolic effort or anything like that it can just be that you right there's the sense of i don't know why i should be using words rather than gestures but no i love by the way i love that you use gestures because because so much of this is non-verbal i'm for the first time like thank you for the first time i'm actually beginning to get a sense of the texture of what you're describing and it's beginning to resonate with what i know uh of mysticism right in my own experience in literature that was very that was very very helpful in in what you just described and that was an insight moment for me so so so thank you well you're welcome and and and to be fair to me and to you when i when i when i started prose the cognitive continuum it was much more just quantitative difference but after doing this work with dan you know on the rovers on mars i came to the realization no there's something within flow that's being carried on not necessarily the flow experience per se as i said you can get mystical experiences out of superflow my taoist practices afford those um and taoism is the religion of flow in many ways right but i i also acknowledge that i don't think that's a necessary feature the necessary feature is that is the meta optimal gripping and so what i typically use and you might appreciate this given your your your morning experience i use the metaphor of taking a stance in martial art okay i'm actually not moving at all when i take my stance i'm absolutely still and the point is that's a useless thing that's a i don't fight with this at all right the stance what is that it's a meta-optimal grip i'm getting a place think of it think of it like a possibility space here's all the moves i need to make here's a place that puts me sort of optimally equally distant from all of those and that's what i mean by a meta-optimal grip that's the analogy now and and i think it's maybe it's not a coincidence that it's an analogy that's actually a state of stillness yes yes as um that that the the murder some somehow there's a merger there of stillness and motion where they they they coexist in that space did you just just as a curiosity when you were formulating your continuum hypothesis was that being done in conjunction with hood's work uh because he has his own form of continuum no the i i mean i i part of it was was suey generous to me and then the convergence argument i found was in newberg newberg in something about how enlightenment changes your brain um uh i think i i i fear i'm misquoting and i forget the second author on the book with him but he actually proposes a cognitive continuum that was the person who i was using as sort of the foil and the contrast i had already proposed in what i published in 2018 the continuum between fluency insight and flow and then when i did when i was starting to do the experimental work on mystical experience i was also seeing evidence that the insight machinery was fundamentally at work yeah yeah i i mean i'd be curious just personally to know sort of what you're at another time because this is just an end but what what you're the i mean the theorists who are trying to sort of explain this thing cognitively and scientifically people like um who was arthur dankman and and who would know those things i'd be curious to know what your thoughts are on them in general and i find their experiments to be to be really to be really great i want to just just before um i mean you're the hoster so you'll you'll bring things to an end but if you'll allow me i i i wrote up a question that i had which which at least i want to put out there um i think it's an important one and and hopefully you'll see something for the future that we can get a chance to talk about it may i please please okay um here's the way i wrote it um you said rightly in your lectures that the propositions are useless because this isn't about propositional knowing it's about participatory transformation this isn't about some secret metaphysical knowledge it's about getting wise practices for transformation um and then and then about combining those with the best science and best metaphysics and in a very beautiful way that you put it um to see what these higher visible states and consciousness can afford for us that we must not confuse the rationality of wisdom with the rationale of knowledge brilliant great great line um so so this idea that that the mystical experiences don't impart actual accurate propositional knowledge which i say and i think you say rightfully so because that leads to all kinds of weird inconsistent strange conclusions people thinking all kinds of strange things um but i i want to try and propose um that that there may be some sort of knowing which we can come to through the experience which is justified which i think i think william james and others describe as the noetic property the knowledge and i think i think the knowledge that emerges if we can reduce it to a proposition is simply the proposition that everything is one um or as you put it yourself that the agent um is to be identified to be made at one with the arena that and my question to you is it it's a bit of a long question but is not the the primary illusion that uh that we humans hold which you refer to which we must transcend um that we're not one without with with everything around us and and by transcending that limiting self-conception and the con and sort of all the good things that come with that the eradication of jealousy and the reason of care and intimacy for others is that not itself wisdom to see through that illusion to live at one with ourselves with everything around us with reality itself and is that not in some sense a proposition not proposition which one has but a proposition which we can be in which we can enact and and and i think to make it to make the final point here i think that the value of trying to distill a proposition from this convergence of the mystical experiences and traditions is a worthwhile endeavor even if granted that this knowledge this gnosis can never be put into true propositional form because it's so categorically beyond that the reason why it's still valuable to try to do something like that is because if we can have any hope for peaceful coexistence of humanity and between us and the natural world between and internally we do need a truth a meta-narrative a story a myth which we can live by and what better truth what better myth than that proposition that all is fundamentally won okay well uh let i so i'll um i won't completely answer i'll just give a preliminary thing and i will promise that you and i will either on your channel or my channel we'll we'll have a discussion around just this topic so we've got at least two things we've got the spinoza talk and then we've got this one awesome uh so i mean in this this and i did mention in the thing that you know i like neoplatonism because it has it has the you know it has the theory and the theoretic practices but it has an independent i mean a standalone argument that doesn't depend on mystical experience in fact there's a debate about how integra you know gerson and others debate about how much the mystical experience is needed uh for plato's argument and you know gerson says he's not denying the mystical component but he thinks the argument can stand on its own as an argument and i that's what that's that's what that's what i was thinking as my model that you have an independent uh account of your ontology um and then you you find you you of course try to seek and this is part of the manifold you try to seek a consonant with uh between your best theories and your best theory as i sometimes put it um so uh if you if if i in it so i am allowing a role for the theoria to impact and constrain the ontology uh so but that's still maybe not what you want and that that's fine yeah but but but one thing i want to say is in this notion again of intelligibility and understanding i think i think the core of neoplatonism comes down to this understanding presupposes that reality is ultimately one because understanding is all right it originally was interstanding and then we turned it into understanding and it's related to sub-stance and all that all that word play but understanding is always here's a bunch of things and here's the unity under them here's a bunch and then here's the unity of the unities and that's why scientists without realizing it are seeking the grand unifying theory why right and there's a presupposition that reality comports right and so i do think that neoplatonism's argument is that understanding and so we use understanding for the cognitive act and intelligibility for the property in the world and they're co-determining i think of them as polar elements within a shared phenomena right that understanding intelligibility pre uh presupposes monism against william james by the way so that's where i'd be in disagreement with james because james thought and this is what i've always and that i've always found problematic in james and i think spinozy just gives the pounding arguments on this right like if you have the two things then you've got to have some third thing that explains the relation and that etc and all that and that that unifying thing is the ultimate and that argue and i think that's the classic neoplatonic insight and so if i'm going to give a qualified thing and it's still not going to satisfy you but but i i i hope you feel it's at least moving uh like we're getting a movement right if mystical experience gives the kind of understanding i was talking about earlier then and if understanding presupposes a kind of monism there is a connection between mysticism as driving understanding and a metaphysics that supports that understanding in order to exist yeah that's that's a that's a really really really really exciting um avenue to explore and i think it connects both of those discussions of this question and espinoza question um and and and i i never mentioned it but but my own my own feeling is that that the propositions are best not to be derived from the experience but from the theory itself so i i'm i'm in strong component with what you're saying and i i would love to get into that because it's really something which i'm working on on my own to to say what is the best case the best metaphysical case for that um so that's that's that's awesome thank you we're great there's a there's a book by nicholas maxwell who i had the pleasure to meet he talks about the uh the comprehensibility of the universe as the fundamental presupposition of science yes yes and berman is making a a just a brilliant case that science depends on sort of of platonic forms uh that brilliant book brilliant tightly argued and very current so anyways let's call it let's call it quits there uh we're doing the john paul start thing we we we don't end anything we're just abandoning it when it's convenient but this was wonderful thank you so much for coming on this is part two and maybe we'll ping pong back maybe go back to you for part three and we can come back here for part four and we'll and we'll have a four-part series on maybe we can call it something like the philosophy and cogsi of mysticism because or something like that where we're trying to get you know we're coming at this from different angles but we're they reach enough towards each other where we get i think very we we get into the logos we we we play off of each other and things emerge so um yes i john i want to say thank you to you for your graciousness and your and your your humbleness in in dialogue i mean i i'm i'm probably young enough to be to be your child i have i have no i have no official standing or recognition i'm just a guy who's interested in the topic who picked up books and started reading and then was and and your your your willingness to to to engage seriously and respectfully and and uh and and and as equals in conversation is is is just astounding is is absolutely if for any like even if nothing handled the conversation for the very fact that of your willingness to to engage with this with such good faith um is itself i think uh an inspiration to to to so many and to to myself and the future of god willing so uh so so and and i mean i i thoroughly enjoyed it to be able to really it's it's it's so rare that i get to actually talk at this level about these topics with anyone um and and and the and the disciplines that you bring into this which which ones i'm totally unaware of and your real grounding in in the in the sciences and in the experimentation and in the philosophy it's just so much fun and and i hope one day we get to sit down in person as well i would love that i would love that very much it would be great to spend some extended time uh in person together i think i you know you know dear logos some of the constituent components of it are serious play and we talked about serious play already um there's serious play but there's also um well i i like i i feel that i was coming to insights in the dialogue with you that i had not gotten to on my own um and that i get to places that i got to places that i couldn't get to on my own and so for me those are the two so two of the defining characteristics of the logo so um so thank you very much and thank you for what you said um i aspire to that uh that to me is um the socratic ideal that i aspire to and when it happens i feel grateful because the more often it happens the more likely i am in an aristotelian fashion to train the habit which will become the virtue uh so thank you thank you for for being such an excellent partner so thank you we're going to keep going on this and we'll keep doing more um this is wonderful yes this is the discussion that needs to happen you know a very deep discussion between you know a really carefully thought out rationally reflective appraisal an appreciation of mystic mysticism and mystical absolutely and and sort of the best cutting-edge cognitive science we have yes i think it's the conversation that needs to be happening right now i agree i agree i agree and uh and i'm honored to be partaking in it well we're going to talk again soon my friend so thank you