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Divine Materialism and Integral Cosmology: Consciousness, Science, and the Spiritual Turn with Marco Masi
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- [00:02]
Marco Massi
When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice flavor fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite obey your thirst.
- [00:24]
Jonathan K.
Limu, Imu and Doug.
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Marco Massi
Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people custom their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
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Jonathan K.
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
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Marco Massi
Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary unwritten by.
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Stefan Julich
Liberty Mutual Insurance company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts.
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Podcast Host/Announcer
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- [01:24]
Jonathan K.
Welcome to the new Books Network.
- [01:36]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Foreign. Welcome to the East West Psychology podcast.
- [01:44]
Marco Massi
The forum for the exploration of psyche and spirit.
- [01:48]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Join our hosts, Jonathan K. And Stefan.
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Marco Massi
Julich and their guests as they delve into the intersection of psychology, philosophy, world wisdom, traditions, the arts and more.
- [02:06]
Jonathan K.
All right, it's my pleasure to be here with Stefan to do another one of the East West Psychology podcasts where we're over 50 at this point and, and it's, it's been quite a journey, but great to be here with you, Stefan. How are you doing? You're in India, so.
- [02:22]
Stefan Julich
Yeah, we just got here. I'm a little jet lagged and I have a cold and my stomach decided to pack it in. So we'll, we'll see.
- [02:31]
Jonathan K.
Par for the course for, for a trip to India. Yeah. Well, thanks for being with us, but I'm very, very happy and honored to have a friend and a collaborator in another sphere of work, which I'll describe later, but we have Marco Massey with us. Welcome, Marco.
- [02:52]
Stefan Julich
Hi.
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Marco Massi
Hi, Jonathan. Hi, Stefan. Thank you for having me.
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Jonathan K.
Yeah. So today we're just going to talk a little bit about the intersections between science and spirituality which you, which is really a part of your life work. And you're a practitioner in integral yoga as well as a scientist. And your book Spirit Calls Nature was the first thing that I was exposed to of your work that was extremely influential and very Inspiring. And also the blog that you do is really you. I would encourage our listeners, I'll put it in the show notes to sign up because on a regular basis you're dealing with absolutely fundamental issues of our times with such integrity and depth from both the scientific and the spiritual perspectives being integrated so wonderfully. I'm just going to read your bio before we get going to give listeners more of a context of who we're talking to. So. Marco Massi attended the German school of Milan in Italy. He graduated in Physics at the University of Padua and later obtained a PhD in physics at the University of Trento. He worked as a postdoc in universities in Italy, France and Germany and as a school teacher for three years after he had authored some scientific papers. His interests veered towards new forms of individual learning. And a concept of free progress education originated from his activity both as a tutor and in several universities and as a high school teacher, but especially from his direct lived experiences of what education should not be. This led him to author a book on free progress education. He also wrote a two volume series on quantum physics entitled Quantum Physics An Overview of a Weird World in which he and which tries to close a gap between the two high level university textbooks and a two lowlevel popular science approach. His interest in metaphysical and philosophical ruminations led him to the vision of Sri Aurobindo. And the mother not only gave him this spiritual path to follow, but also answered many questions he was looking for in science. And so here we are sitting together. Maybe I'll just turn it over to you to kind of in your own, maybe in your own words describe a little bit more for us how you found those, those intersections. And I also learned from this bio just now. It's a new bio that I pulled up. But you're also interested in, in education and pedagogy. So maybe, maybe just give us a little bit of your own personal story about how you came from scientific background and, and what were maybe some of those experiences that really opened you to see the, the closures of our, the dominant education system. The spiritual vision of Shurbin the mother kind of really helped find something other options.
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Marco Massi
Yeah, you know I had a bit this opposite experience, not not opposite but neutral experience. Then you know very often people say I was an atheist, materialist, physicalist, reductionist and then some inspiration or illumination or great spiritual experience came in and then they changed their mind and had a completely different worldview. This is not the case in my case, this is not the real story. I had an in between story, that is. I was for a long time an agnostic. When I was a child I had all, there was all kind of religious influence, but that didn't frame my character much. But for a long time I was an agnostic. And I had this interest of so many to know at the end, who am I? What is the universe? Why are we here? For what reason? And there was still in the background this idea that science would explain everything. But I was not so sure already I was not the real die hard materialist. I went to college, studied physics and so on. And there you see, I had the opposite experience as many that when you study too much a certain discipline you begin to be absorbed also your worldview begins to be absorbed in that kind of worldview that your discipline is. When you study physics you tend perhaps a bit too much to see things from a perspective that is not necessarily wrong, but it's only one sided. On the other side I said I don't find anything better. Where is it? Until one day I read a book, not still not about Sriobindo but about yoga. And the first impact was that with Vedanta that told me I am the universe, all is one. And you know the kind of metaphysical worldview that you get when you enter into contact with Vedanta teachings. Still it was yes, very interesting, but not the real thing. Until I encountered of course Sri Aurobindo and the mother and he also not in a very traditional way because most people get into contact with Sri Aurobindo with his adventure of consciousness. Whereas I came in contact with the trilogy still of Satprem. But he wrote a trilogy and there I got a perspective, this perspective of the divine materialism. I think this is not coined by Sri Aurobindo, but by Sad Prem himself. He called it the divine materialism. And this was for me a sort of opening explosion that make absolute sense for me, absolute sense. And okay, and then that was. I was finally trapped in the Albindonian orbit. And since then this happened in the 1990s. So it's about 30 years ago. And well that framed my background. And still today it is essentially my background, my metaphysical philosophical background, so to speak. But yet this idea to make this connection between science and spirituality, you know, when you look it up online and you see a lot of people engaged with this kind of topic, but as so many, I am not very satisfied. Most of them are mainly, yeah, the usual woohoo that's called Woohoo or quantum Woohoo or Quakery or Pseudoscience or quantum hype or whatever. And I was very dissatisfied with that. But nevertheless I was very much motivated to work myself in this field and to see myself how to bring these two things together. And it is not easy at all because you feel, I feel like being stretched to the extreme onto polarities and like a spring. And sometimes the spring breaks you see on the set. It's really hard. Yeah. Because we can eventually also discuss the notion of what we mean really by being integral. Because this notion of integrality, yes, it's a nice word, but it's also a word in fashion and it's easier to say what it is not than what it is. Anyway, we can discuss this later. And during my experience I worked in universities, of course, had an experience also in research centers and so on. And then as you already mentioned, also as a teacher. And there it became also very clear for me how our educational system already implants in us a certain worldview that distance us, distances us from this idea to put things together. Because for example, take we, when we speak about the connection between usually we among us, we speak about science and spirituality. Most people speak about science and religion, which for me is a very different thing. And most of the case people me, because this is more in the western part of the world is this kind of topic in fashion. And most of them mean the Christian theology. This is for me a bit too limiting. Not that it's not interesting, it's you of course also there you can see, you can learn and you can be inspired by a lot of things, but it's too limited for me. And that's also why I came also to write this kind of paper here which is focused mainly on the consciousness studies on the so called philosophy of mind, but which is usually seen only from the Western perspective. And yeah, some people know about the Eastern vedantic standpoint. But despite the fact that Sri Aurobindo has a lot to say about that subject, only rarely is he mentioned in this kind of literature. And therefore, yeah, I wrote this paper because this was a sort of amendment that I tried to make.
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Jonathan K.
Yeah, great, yeah. And let me just introduce the name of the paper again. It'll be in the notes. It's the Integral Cosmology of Srirab Indo an introduction from the perspective of consciousness studies. And I just thought that was so such. It was such a great article and thought it would really relate to our, the east west psychology discourse community. For, for anybody really who saw anybody that. That would like a bit of a primer on the Sri Aurobindo's cosmology, which is, you know, very much a part of how CIAS engages in the various disciplines that we are engaging like transpersonal psychology, theoretical work and, and whatnot. But in terms of. I just wanted to take a second to stop and ask you if you could give us that primer on consciousness studies and the, and the philosophy of mind. And that's something that I think that, that I could especially, I could use a little bit of clarity from your perspective, who, who really. You're an expert within that field. So is it, can you, can you just do that? Can you give us a little bit of, of how you see, you know, intern, like you said, the, the discourse around the philosophy mind is obviously is plural in itself and there's a lot of people that disagree with each other. But you obviously have been in this field and have a breadth of experience with the different views and you walk us through some of those and then bring us to the idea like bring us through to Sri Aurobindo's notion and then maybe talk a little bit about how you really see that as, as, as being important in the discussion nowadays. How bringing Sri Aurobindo's thought about consciousness into the, you know, into the. Our contemporary discussion is actually really can help us break through some of those closures that were otherwise not finding or we're assuming things about certain philosophies of mind that really aren't going to take us to break through a certain problematic that we're finding ourselves in.
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Marco Massi
Yeah, yeah, you know, the so called philosophy of mind, which for the, in my, in my opinion is already misnomer because it puts at the same level the mind and consciousness. Whereas where the mind and consciousness are the same thing. It's highly questionable and certainly it's not from the point of view of Sri Aurobindo. But the so called philosophy of mind is certainly not new. I think we can go back at least to Rene Descartes who had this idea of dualism where you have this dualism between mind and body, mind and matter. But it received any renewed attention it, for a long time it has been almost forgotten because people then said the materialistic paradigm, the biological reductionist paradigm that sees all everything in the brain and says the brain is what produces our mind, our consciousness, what we are, it's all our essence. The purely materialistic standpoint reigned for a long time, but it received, during these fundamental questions about our nature, our conscious nature received the renewed attention I would say in the 1980s, 1990s for a simple reason that for the technology was far enough. Now, with brain scans, FMRI and all the machines that you can study the brain, We went technologically so far that we could study with a high level of detail the brain's functions. The question again came to the center of the debate, what is consciousness and how does the brain produce consciousness? Until nowadays we have made a lot of discoveries. Certainly neuroscience has made an enormous progress. But when it comes to this question and to these more fundamental philosophical questions that are at the limits of metaphysics, between science and metaphysics, science, religion, science and spirituality, it is completely mute. 0 In a sense, we could say that despite all the technological advances, the question to the answer to what is consciousness? We don't know much more in this sense. We don't know much more about these things than what we knew at the time of the car. We are still there and asking ourselves, is the mind and consciousness only a product of the brain, or is there more? The opinions here, of course, are almost infinite. You will find for every philosopher and scientists, neuroscientist, every one of us will have probably a different idea about these sort of things. But the interesting point is that science, it's not that it made incremental progress on this subject, it made no progress at all. So many philosophers came to the conclusion that maybe we are in a position where we have to rethink old doctrines and consider the possibility that perhaps some of those mystics, philosophers, saints, religious figures, theologicians and so on, maybe some of them were right, or that there is something metaphysical, there's some metaphysical dimension. Of course, there are a lot of theories. Now. Panpsychism, for example, has returned back, which is also not a new doctrine. Psychism also dates back, I think, to Spinoza or Leibniz. But now you will find modern philosophers arguing, obviously with a lot more information that we have nowadays due to science, that they take a panpsychist standpoint. Others have taken effectively an idealistic point of view. Idealism like that of Berkeley or Schopenhauer. The famous name nowadays is Bernardo Kastup, who is. He calls himself an analytic idealist. And idealism essentially says everything is mind, because after all, when we think about it, really what we perceive of the world is always filtered through a conscious experience. We can say of nothing. Nothing is not conscious. Even if I point at a stone, I'm in reality pointing at an experience, a visual experience or tactile experience, some form of experience mediated through, yes, of course, our brain, a lot of layers of whatever but at the end there is still the conscious experience, which seems to be the most fundamental thing after all. So there are the idealists who say everything is mind and the universe is the cosmic mind and every also using material objects that we perceive are ultimately some sort of the thought of God. Yeah, Castor would not say that. That's more Berkeley. But anyway, I don't go now into the technical details. Then there are others who are inspired by some Eastern philosophies, especially Vedanta. They are the so called cosmopsychists who says all the cosmos is one consciousness and are inspired by this vedantic notions. So this is a very, yeah, very superficial summary, by the way. I could also say that there is this idea. What is re emerging is Panentheism. Panentheism is a doctrine that says not only is all the cosmos God, but nature is in itself, in God is part of God, but God is not all of nature. So what we call the universe, the physical universe, is only a subset, so to speak, of this cosmic consciousness or transcendent consciousness. So there are the pantheists, panentists. And of course it is a battle with the materialists, those who contend that no, we should stick to the scientific realism, to a purely materialistic understanding. Still, I would say, unfortunately for me, at least from my point of view, they are still the majority. However, I think that the opposite, this, how can we call it the spiritualist? The spiritualist point of view is growing steadily. I think that we are almost on the verge of a flip on the other side. Anyway, so how came I then to write this article here? Because I was nevertheless dissatisfied. Because almost all, with few exceptions, but almost all. Look at these topics from a purely Western perspective and they rarely even read, even inform themselves about what the Eastern philosophers have to do, have to have to say. And I chose Sri Aurobindo to make this integral view and to connect the dots with the Western philosophy of mind. Not because necessarily I think that the others had nothing to say. As I said, Vedanta, for example, can tell you a lot, but also Buddhism can tell you a lot and so on. But Aurobindo has this integral view and there I think that he's unique in this integral view. And this can serve us much better to connect east with west with the Western paradigm. So what is missing in my point of view, and I think Shcherbindo has this also said more or less indirectly in his writings, One thing which I already mentioned, this identification between mind and consciousness, there is this coarse grained view of reality. In the Western philosophy of mind there is eventually the metaphysician or those who are attracted by a spiritual worldview. Usually there is this mind and body or mind and matter, or soul and matter dualism, but not much more than that. Whereas Sri Aurobindo and you have this also in the Samkhya yoga philosophy. It represents a universe that has many layers, not only just two. Because materialism is a mono dimensional worldview. All is matter or more precisely all is the laws of physics, is physical and determined by the laws of physics and physicalism, so called. This is one dimensional. Descartes was the word already says that was a dualist, that it was. He was two dimensional. But I think we should now begin to think in multidimensional terms because this is a two coarse grained worldview, just subdivide everything only in minded matter. In between there are also other layers. Shobindo called them so the vital, the mental, the over mental, the supramental. It is not necessary to adopt exactly these classifications. I think these are just mental cruxes and these are not necessarily indicating a real truth in itself. I think these, all these levels of consciousness go into each other like a continuous spectrum, not like a discrete spectrum. But that's not important. The important thing is at least to consider this hypothesis that we are multi layered. We are not just a block of mind and matter. That's all. And this is something for some reason that I don't understand has. It's very difficult in the Western world. This does not get through or very seldomly.
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Jonathan K.
And.
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Marco Massi
Then the other important aspect that you find in Sri Aurobindo and still also this is a paradox, still is missing from my, at least from what I could see in the Western world is the evolutionary aspect of, in the frame of spirituality. And that's a paradox because after all it was the west who framed first in clear scientific terms the concept of evolution. The fact that we are not the ultimate, we are not the human being is also the result of an evolutionary process and so on. It's not an eastern idea from the eastern philosophies, it's from the western world, the scientific world. But they are extremely resistant in accepting, in importing this idea into a spiritual discourse. I think perhaps it has to do with, with the fact that in the west we have this battle between creationists and Darwinists. And then therefore perhaps philosophers and scientists prefer not to go into this minefield. That's perhaps one of the reasons. But yeah, whatever. And this is also something that Shurobino gives us, and it is reminiscent in a sense to Chardin or it's not completely absent. Yeah. That also came up with similar ideas. John Jepser. Yeah. And Udo Steiner and perhaps also others. But yeah, we are talking about figures of the last century who is continuing this kind of worldview that connects consciousness with matter, with evolution, with eventually also this idea that mind is not the ultimate product of evolution. Perhaps after the mind will come, the evolution will go on. Yeah, this would be perfectly in line also with the most hardliner, the most hardest kind of Darwinian orthodox idea of evolution, that evolution didn't stop. And therefore it should be a natural idea, natural logical step to say, okay, probably also mind is not the last step. And yet it's difficult to get this through. So that's the reason why I was attracted by this cosmology that I called integral cosmology. It's not the name of, it's not Sri Aurobindo called it. But I thought that this integral cosmology of Sri Aurobindo could be interesting also for the Western perspective.
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Stefan Julich
Thanks, Marco. It was really fascinating journey. I have a full page of notes, but I don't overwhelm you. I'm trying to boil it down into a single question. And I guess the most fundamental question for me is, I mean, given that the dominant conversation that the conversation that you're kind of explicating with care and nuance and sensitivity to. What sensitivity to the complexities of the question are usually in America is boiled down to Richard Dawkins versus the fundamentalists. And I, you know, just, just taking that, just taking a kind of a pure materialistic, reductionist, scientific perspective. And then maybe you could say a religionist perspective, but you could even include spirit spirituality in a broader sense there. My. What I, what I, what I see in my own research is. And I'm, I think you're the right person to ask because you have a background in the hard sciences and then you move into philosophy. So you, you function in, in two universes and you're bridging these universes. And your paper, the paper that I read, you bridge, bridge it really beautifully through Sri Aurobindo's ideas. So I guess the, the question is if we need to start in some way with assumptions. I mean, the basic assumptions are the information that my senses are bringing in and how I interpret it. I mean, just like really, really basic ways in which we're interacting with the world around us and how we think about it using the language that we Inherit which has certain biases involved in it. Also, how do we reconcile the differences between an approach that. Where materialism isn't, isn't just matter, isn't just the subject of inquiry, but materialism is an assumed truth. That kind of reductionist approach or the approach that maybe a religionist takes where the, the fundamental reality is the non scientific, it's not materialistic. So you are approaching the same reality, we hope, which is essentially our existence and our personal experience. How do we determine where do we begin in our inquiry? And is there a way in which you find in Sri Aurobindo's work or in your own work, a way to bridge these two universes? And maybe if you can start with a kind of like an articulation of the. The different assumptions that people begin with when they, when they carry their own personal experience into their inquiry. If that makes sense.
- [35:45]
Marco Massi
Yeah. Let me first say that I think it's impossible not to have assumptions. If someone tells you that they don't have assumptions, then you can be almost certainly sure that they have a lot of assumptions. They are only starting with a lot of presumptions. So there's nothing wrong in starting from assumptions. Also eventually wrong assumptions. The important thing that we are aware that we have assumptions, that we have a certain cultural background, that we have been also raised as children in a very religious environment, others in the opposite kind of realm. And this, and this frames your worldview. Inevitably. Also those who say I have no philosophy is this is already a philosophy. That when you say that you don't have a philosophy is so there's nothing, nothing wrong. I think if one starts from the materialistic assumption or the opposite assumption, the important thing is remaining open to every possibility. And I say if we want try to begin to create a bridge, we should give a chance to the first person approach to everything. Science, spirituality. Or maybe you can also frame it in this way. Science should give the first person approach a chance and spirituality should also give a chance to the third person approach. Because from a scientific point of view, when you tackle with these philosophical questions, it is inevitable that you have sooner or later to go inward. When we say, for example, what is consciousness? Also what is mind? It is impossible to find it out there. You cannot say oh my consciousness is. I can pinpoint it in a point in space or say it's there under the table, or it's that you cannot photograph your consciousness. And yet if we take the purely scientific perspective, we would say that consciousness does not exist. Yet why do most. Well, there is also a kind of philosopher who says that consciousness does not exist. I leave them outside of the equation for the moment. But almost all philosophers and also scientists will say, yeah, consciousness is somehow exists, somehow I am conscious. I'm not just a zombie. How can you say that? And how do you know that others are conscious? You can only do this by a turn inward, taking the first person perspective and say, well, because I know that I am conscious, I cannot prove you that I'm conscious. But on the other side, I know for sure. Perhaps it's the only thing that we can be absolutely sure that I'm conscious in the sense by consciousness, I mean, let's also. What does it mean really? Yeah, sure. We should also explain what consciousness. What do we mean when we speak about consciousness? Let's simplify things. It's not. This is not really the Aribandonian view, But to simplify things, let's say consciousness is the ability to perceive something, to have emotions, to have feelings, to have perceptions, to have a subjective experience that is consciousness. I don't think that my clock has a conscious experience, that it feels something. I don't think that my computer feels something. But I'm quite open to believe that you feel something and that you are conscious. Why not? Because I have an empirical, experimental evidence of it. But I go inwards, see that I'm conscious because it's the only thing that I'm really sure about. And I have no reason to believe that I'm the only conscious being in the universe. And you are all unconscious and insentient zombies. Yeah, so this is. Yeah, but this is not so easy. This is a not so easy step to become, to. To get to that point where you realize that there exists something, that you can be sure that there exists something, and yet you can not prove it, not even in principle with the scientific method. And taking this first step is, I think, fundamental to realize at least intellectually. Intellectually is also enough as a first step. I would say that the future of science and spirituality is that to combine the first person perspective with the third person perspective to get to this fusion and first person perspective also means to be open therefore to what mystics told us. Maybe they have something to tell us also Western mystics. I think if you read Plotinus, for example, I would say this is a very Eastern, not philosopher mystic. Interestingly, I know of almost no one in the philosophy of mind that take up what Plotinus said, but it's very. But why? Yeah, I don't know, because probably he is too Eastern. The Eastern philosopher and that. And people don't like it, especially because we have also been conditioned by our religion. I think because we don't like to get, not to set aside our religion, it's fine, everyone has one's own religion. But to be open also to other religions and to other mystical experiences and to at least listen and say, what is the world? And I think this is. You find it in every culture that the mystical experience tells you, goes into the direction of the idealist at least. And even more, I would contend that tells you what we call matter is a manifestation of consciousness as well. This is of course a very strong claim, a very strong statement that's also not easy to bring on the table from a scientific perspective. But I think we can say a lot of things also about that. And then one thing that I also, as already mentioned, I said, let's take this first person perspective and see. Am I right or wrong in saying that mind and consciousness are two distinct things? If you put this as a discussion from the philosophical. And people tend to go, tend to shift to the third person perspective. They all say, yeah, but that's a word play. It's semantics at best. Yeah, if you use one or the other word. But I say go inward and look. What does your mind, what is your mind? What do we mean by a mind? Mind is when you thoughts, you have a thought that comes and goes. You have a lot of thoughts that come and go, come and go. And who is a witness. Yet there is a conscious witness that witnesses these thoughts that come and go. I think that everyone would agree with that. So there is something in the background that we perceive as stable, at least in the waking state. When we are in other states of consciousness, that's another subject per se. But at least in the waking state, we perceive something stable, that is a witness and something that is mutable the thoughts. So I say perhaps it makes sense to make this distinction between mind and consciousness. You don't need to agree necessarily to this, but at least this is an example of how we can use the first person perspective to discuss these things. Also at a more rational standpoint.
- [45:35]
Jonathan K.
Then.
- [45:36]
Marco Massi
There are also other tricks with which you can, for example, instill the doubt that what we perceive of the world is not as it is or as it appears, it's just an appearance. It seems to be quite a strong claim. Are we living in a dream? No, it's very simple. You can just, with some thought experiment, think, how do you see, for example, an object outside in the world, say a rock A chair. Say a chair. In reality, you don't see the chair. If you think about it, you see the light reflected from the chair. Okay, one second. Yeah, okay. But the light contains all, more or less, all the informations of the chair. So I can say that it is out there, that's real. It is exactly as it appears to me if I don't wear glasses like myself here. But if you see the world with your eyes, you can say, yeah, I see the world as it is. Now think about it. What happens with that light? That light is received by the retina of your eyes and is transformed into chemical, biochemical, bioelectric information. It's no longer light at that point. Do you see something at that point? No, in reality, you don't see something. When the light arrives on your retina, you need to go. This impulse, this dielectrical impulse must go into your brain in the visual cortex. Do you see something then? No, you still don't see something. It must be then transformed, elaborated. It is extremely complex process that nobody knows what exactly happens. And then it is distributed in all your brain, throughout your brain. And then suddenly, for some mysterious mechanism that nobody knows how it works, then you see something. In reality, all what you see is not the light or the things out there. Everything that you perceive, hear, smell, touch and so on is a reconstruction inside your brain. And that has gone through many, many, many layers of elaboration. When you think about this and realize it's just a purely intellectual. It's nothing mystical. It's just purely scientific, intellectual, you begin to understand that what you see is in a certain sense, a virtual reality. It's not the reality as it is. This doesn't mean that there is nothing. It's not a sort of nihilism. That would be also a wrong extrapolation. But what you see is a fiction, a story, in a sense, of what we call reality. Becoming aware only intellectually from this standpoint opens the mind. Opens the mind to. Yeah, to other layers, I think. And that's the approach. I think that we must learn. It's something that it must be learned. It's not something that you can just learn with an exercise, a quits. But, yeah, this is a kind of. It is also an inner. Inner attitude, inner mental attitude, inner spiritual attitude. That to consider also how do we perceive internally, inside of us, the world? And how do we think, how does our mind work? And that's why I say it's okay to have suppositions, but also to be aware how your mind Jumps to conclusion based on these suppositions and so on. So it's an internal work and in external work. And connecting the scientific third person perspective with a spiritual first person perspective. That is a challenge.
- [50:23]
Stefan Julich
Yeah, well, yeah, I was just going to say that. With me it's assumptions all the way down. So I'm. Every moment of my life I'm attempting. There's some part of me that wants to concretize the experience. It just, it's. I think it's natural so that you know what it is that you're facing, what you're up against and you can make decisions about what it is that you need to do. And yet the, the greater part of me is also longing to be in, in an open ended exploration. Each moment, each moment that each moment opens to an infinity. Each moment opens to an infinity. But I need to use the toilet. I need to get a drink of water. I need to get some sl. And sleep may happen naturally you can, but you don't want to fall down outside on the sidewalk. You want to be able to bring yourself home into your home, into a bed. So it, it does seem that there's this tension between these two, these two tendencies to, to want to boil things down into easily digestible and easily understood bits. And the deeper I explore, the more, the richer that tapestry becomes. And then there's the part of me that just wants to stay open so that I'm not, you know, even in a conversation like this, wanting to guide the conversation, like, oh, I hear one thing that you say and then for the next, you know, two minutes I'm thinking of what that thought that just came to me and I'm no longer listening, I'm no longer present in the conversation.
- [52:04]
Marco Massi
Yeah, yeah, sure, we must learn to become multi disciplinary, but not in the intellectual sense, but we. So what you just said is a psychological view of how you think, how you live your life, how you think about things and so on. And we must become psychologists, scientists, spiritualities, spiritualists, mystics, intellectuals, everything. That's the integrality. And I think nobody can do that. Yeah, we are, we are not there yet. Yeah, maybe when we are, I don't know, supramental gnostic beings or whatever, then perhaps we can, can really be integral in this sense. But at least taking also this psychological approach is necessary. On the other side, I would also say the opposite. I see sometimes people have too much psychological approach and refuse the scientific one. Yeah. Because perhaps they had bad experiences. And I can understand that with purely physicalist materialists who see things in a very close minded way, point and point of view the world. So this is a real challenge to, if you have been raised up as a materialist, to see the spiritual aspect of your own discipline. Because every discipline has this polar, multipolar, I would say aspect. And if you have been raised in a more religious or spiritual context, you should also become able to see the. It's not about, it's not about knowing everything. That's, that's still a very traditional point of view, but it is to become able to take the perspective from different points of view without necessarily being an expert in this. When I'm for example, I'm not a psychologist, but I think I can a little bit see the point of view of the psychologist and the psychologist should also, or the spiritualists should also to be able to see the point of view of the scientist. Then when we have these two points of view to merge them in a third thing that is neither nor. And yeah, it's easier said than done, but at least we should try and I think we can if we are not close to this idea. But it's difficult.
- [55:14]
Jonathan K.
Yeah, yeah. And I was just going to say it's like what you're saying is it's kind of taking us back to the earlier paradigm of how, I mean in the West, Western philosophy, for instance, when we go back to those early thinkers, it was before all of the disciplines became so siloed and disconnected from each other. A natural philosopher was all of those things to various degrees. And there was a level of, of mystical inquiry, there was a level of, of kind of observation, experimentation, there was a level of, of rational deduction. You know, all these things kind of were serving something larger. You could say like, you know, the, to, to develop or to, to make the psyche or whatever. You know, like I'm just saying like that was I think more of a natural disposition earlier and now we have, which comes with its strengths but also with its weaknesses, this super specialty, the super specialization within the discipline. And it's like you can go farther and farther and like continue to refine your, your kind of discourse community into one direction which brings its own unique insights. But at the same time it's also, you're losing track of, let's say a larger connections with larger things. And so I love what you're saying. I see that in my own scholarship, but also in my own musical life. And I've done both where I've gone very deep into certain things at times and I've really had a Single pointed, kind of, single pointed concentration on a subject. And I would eliminate other things. Like for instance, when I went to India to learn raga music, that was something I really was passionate about. And I kind of put jazz on a hold for, for a while there. Not that I ever forgot it, but it's just said, no, I'm going to really just be in this world. I'm going to be in this world as much as I can. But I also really did feel that, okay, now I've done this for a while and I've gone, I've gone into this world and this world lives in me to some degree now. Now how does this world relate to this other. Like these other worlds that I've also built within me. And I think that each one has its own truth in a sense or in its own consistency, its own internal dynamics and consistency. But I think exactly what you're, what you're saying is that they, we need to learn how they can speak to each other. And that's really more about the transversal. How do we get these things to engage with each other, to create something that is unforeseeably different than the two things that are coming into collision or into confluence. And in terms of knowledge production, I think that's absolutely true.
- [57:53]
Marco Massi
Yeah. But let me say one thing. The fact that we are nowadays a bit caged in these super specialties.
- [58:05]
Jonathan K.
I.
- [58:05]
Marco Massi
Think this is inevitable. It's inevitable. I mean, for example, in physics you cannot know everything about your own subject. Nowadays there is no physicist who knows everything about physics. It's impossible. We don't have such a big brain. So you are forced, if you like it or not, you are always forced to take some super specialty. Yeah, and I think this is not the real problem. The real problem is when you are no longer able to go beyond that, at least here it's also, in a sense, it's also an internal, an internal.
- [58:51]
Jonathan K.
Shift and, and it creates those, those assumptions. Maybe this is where those assumptions. When you are unable to go beyond the assumptions of the discipline that you're working in.
- [59:01]
Marco Massi
Yeah, absolutely. Yes. This is the root cause of the inability to go beyond those assumptions. But I think also, as I said, it's important not to know a bit of everything because this was possible perhaps at the time of Newton, Galileo and so. But nowadays if you know a bit of everything, at the end, you don't know absolute, almost nothing. And so this specialization is, I think, almost unavoidable, at least in my field. The important thing is that I can Take your perspective. When you say, for example, you talk about music, I say, okay, interesting. How can we experience the world from a sound experience from a sound perspective? How does sound relate to consciousness? How does. And that's where I also don't know if I sent you that. I had also a little paper. I didn't publish this still not because I don't, don't find anyone who is able to. Willing to publish it. The, the paper on Abhinavagupta and Sri Rabino on the philosophy of language. Because there you connect sound with language, the philosophy of language with science, with mysticism. And I connected it also, I, my personally, I connected it also to artificial intelligence. And then you have this grand view, this grand scheme. Yeah, it's not easy to see, to see how these things relate, but they relate a lot. If you are able to see the different point of view, they relate a lot. But it's difficult to find someone who is willing to publish these kind of things because also the publishers are all specialized and the philosophy of language is nowadays mostly Western philosophy. It's analytic, analytical philosophy and these mystical things. Yet I would say the Sri Aurobindo had a lot to say also about that. Yeah. And Abhivana Binna Vagupta also. So, yeah, that's a big challenge of our time. It's not to become multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, but to take, make this inner shift that you are able at least a bit to see things also from the perspective of the person of the other one. Yeah, yeah. And, and yeah, that's, that's, that's, yeah, that's beautiful.
- [62:02]
Jonathan K.
And I'm glad that you are bringing up because you're, you're right a lot of the times when you challenge, like in, in music, for instance, we'll go back to my world in music. You know, we've had this tradition, especially in Indian classical musical, Western classical music. He's like the virtuosic master, you know, and, and that's been the paradigm that says that's the modernist paradigm. And there's something that's very powerful about somebody who goes, puts the blinder like, you know, really goes deep and just spends their whole life going in that one direction. How do you, how do you, you know, how do you do this one thing? And we, the world needs that, that, that model also carries a lot of baggage too in other ways we don't need to get into. But, but I think that when you say, well, there's also, there's also a Different kind of. Of musician that does. That makes more transversal connections between, let's say, playing different instruments or working within multiple traditions. A lot of times people might take that to the extreme and say, oh, well, it's not about, you know, it's not surely about being the, The. The. The technical virtuosic master, but it also can become very watered down to say, oh, I don't need to be good at any of them. I can just kind of noodle away. And that's fine. And, you know, that's. That for some people, you know. But I think that to be. To be very clear, like, well, to get, to get to that depth with anything requires a certain type of focus and discipline that takes you through the technical apparatus, whether it's thinking scientifically or it's playing an instrument. If you really want to get beyond, you know, your own little world, you've got to. You've got to really cultivate that technique that can allow the power, like the power, the. The force, the. The consciousness of the individual to be able to kind of transduce itself through the different. Different environments and between people and whatnot. So I think that's important to say in my, in my dissertation, I use this notion of a mandala, of becoming, which has various nodes in it, just like a mandala does one. Like, because I work in multiple disciplines. For instance, jazz and raga. I'll just say those two. There's others. Others as well. But it's really.
- [64:17]
Marco Massi
How many instruments do you. One or many.
- [64:21]
Jonathan K.
I play multiple instruments. Yep.
- [64:23]
Marco Massi
Okay.
- [64:23]
Jonathan K.
Yeah. I've spent most of my life playing saxophone. So that's really kind of. That's really like an extra limb at this point. But I play Ben Suri and Siraj from Indian instrument music. And so it's not like, obviously I. Sax one will always be my most technically proficient instrument. But does that mean that. Does that mean that that's. That's the only thing that can carry my, you know, the, like the soul of my. Myself into music. Well, surely not. There's other instruments that can do that as well. And so I think that's where in this mandala of becoming, you know, as the operator between these. These types of traditions, who. I. I'm deep in these traditions, but I'm also not reducible to only them. And I. I'm the center, the bindu point of the. The mandala. Whereas these nodes in the mandala themselves start to communicate with each other. And it's not necessarily. At first, it was done through kind of Decisions and saying, I want to do this raga on a Western instrument or I want to do this. I want these two nodes to engage with each other. And I had to rationally kind of create a context or artistically say, I'm going to do this with this, or I want to write. And. And. But at a certain point they started to kind of communicate with each other almost on their own terms. And this is where things get very interesting when we talk about integral yoga psychology. And so I would just want to add to the framework that we're speaking because you were kind of talking about the first person and the third person. And there's an integration here. How can we see these two perspectives one without the other is always going to leave us with a lens that is really excluding something that's fundamentally true. So the question is, how can we. How can we not only integrate them, but how can we be them, know them and like, truly like, like, as in a lived experience where they don't negate each other, they don't need to cancel each other out. They can both exist in a paradoxical to the mind in a paradoxical sense from either perspectives. They don't need to be reconciled into some rational synthesis that is a higher order thing that's come out of it. They can also just be. They can be that those two poles of this continuum can be held in tension. They're not reducible to each other, but they are also. They can coexist and they can be known integrally. And then I just wanted to add one more thing to that, which would be in one of the thinkers I use in my work, Deleuze, he talks about the fourth person, you know, and so getting into cosmopsychism and you know, I could. The fourth person would allude to like the non human, even like, okay, now we have another problematic. You're right. Okay, so an integral consciousness is not only first, like a reconciliation of first and third, but also fourth person. What is that? And that's a huge patient for exploration and experimentation because that's going to again, be. It's kind of if it's something that you need to experience, people that experience, you know, kind of, you know, we've talked about mystical or transpersonal liminal experiences that can't be reduced to either first or second. And it leaves you like, oh, well, there's something else that. There's another layer here that is even problematizing, like the human centricness of what we're talking about. And the integral consciousness is, I think, about These invitations. And so, yeah, yeah.
- [67:41]
Marco Massi
The fourth person, I perceive very much in nature. Nature for me, this impersonal presence of nature is for me, a sort of fourth person. Yeah. I don't know if Deleuze meant that, but that's also, in fact, if you look at this, this is also a problem of our society, that we feel ourselves still divided from nature. We don't feel ourselves part of nature. And this creates all the ecological problem issues that we have nowadays. Because we don't feel that when we destroy nature, we are automatically also destroying ourselves, at least on the long term. And if you have this inner ability to get into the spiritual contact with nature, you know this not from a rational point of view, you know it internally. It's a feeling. It's something. When I see that they cut the two trees in front of my door, I feel as if they are cutting something away of myself. Yeah. The reason. And I don't know why they had to cut them away. They were beautiful. But evidently, when you don't see this beauty in nature, when you see in nature only something to exploit, then you have not this inner contact and this inner point of view. This is also. If not first person, then fourth person. Yeah. It's a beautiful example. Then there's this cosmic perspective which goes even beyond. This would be a fifth person. But that's what we are missing.
- [69:36]
Stefan Julich
Yeah. I just wanted to interject a question. At the beginning, when Jonathan was introducing you, he also mentioned that your interests are moving to pedagogy and education. And I'm thinking based on something that Jonathan had said, that it brings up a really interesting question about how do we train the minds of the future? How do we approach our students so that they can actually hold these complexities in a way that helps them grow towards an integral way of knowing or being or becoming.
- [70:12]
Marco Massi
I would hear, push back a bit and say we should not train the minds of the future. We should train the souls of the future.
- [70:24]
Stefan Julich
Yeah.
- [70:24]
Marco Massi
Because education is not only about. Of course, there is of course also the mental education. That this is also, of course, an extremely important aspect. But. But I think our society is too focused on the mind. I myself, the problem is that when people read my things, obviously they say, oh, you are so mental. Yes, I am. But there is a pointer to something else. I think education should focus less on the mind and more. Well, in the Arabindonian nomenclature, we would say on the psychic being. Because education is for, first of all, from the side of the adults. It should not be the idea to Cram information into the minds of the children, but to create the context so that the psychic being can blossom, which is a completely different. He has also a different point of view where perhaps externally. Yeah, you do. If not the same thing, very similar things. It would be still about reading, about learning things, about doing math or the traditional things. Yeah. But it's not what. It's not so important what children learn, but how they learn it. Because, by the way, I don't remember almost nothing of what I've learned in school and even in college and university. Most of if I should have. If I must go through all the details of my examinations, I would probably not be. Or no longer be able to. To do that. But that's not important. The important thing is that you acquire the skill to do something by yourself. And this idea that you exercise your mind, of course, but everything holistically, all what you are to teach yourself things instead of going around and asking others what the truth is. Yeah. And this soul aspect, I think, is central. And that's the problem also here in our Western materialistic society. The pedagogy that is based on the notion of a soul. Yeah. Immediately raises eyebrows because people say, oh, that's too spiritual to mystery. Yeah, In a sense it is. But we are psychic beings. We are souls in evolution. And an education must be centered on the development of the soul first and foremost, which also, of course, implies the development of the mind. But I don't think we can really develop the mind without. For example, I just read recently a debate about when should children learn reading? Then you will find one camp that says as early as possible at two years they should learn the Alphabet and this and that. Others say, no, no, no, it's four years, five years, six years, six years, seven years and so on. And nobody, nobody put forward the idea that perhaps it depends from It's. It's an individual choice, inner choice of the child. At some point there are children that learn it very early and it's fine. And there are other children that learn it a bit later. Okay. If you still are 20 years old and still can't read. Okay. I say then perhaps we have a problem. But this idea to find the size that fits all. Yeah. This is still very strong in our culture that we must. Because it's also the school system itself that imposes this. Because what kind of school system do you have if one child learns first and the other. And we have this age structure in our educational system? This should be. Be questioned in my point of view. Perhaps there Are things that I need more time to learn them and it's perfectly okay. I don't know this personally, but I know of cases. I've read of cases of people who read, learned to read at the age of 9, 10 years, very, very late. They are perfectly normal people, have perfectly normal life. Others have learned it because if you let the soul blossom, which in practical terms means you create this context where you let the child to tell you, now the time has come, I want to learn that. I think this would work. And maybe it's also, you know, free progress education. Because mother called it free progress education here also. We should not perhaps fall in this temptation of the one size fits all. It's maybe a good form of education for some children and not for others. I know from my experience, perhaps it's the majority still. Yeah. That they need this extremely clear structure. What to do, when to do, how to do it. Okay. If your child feels well in this kind of educational environment, that's fine. But be aware that there might be some children that are looking like. Obviously, for obvious reasons, even an adult would not be able to rationalize this and to verbalize this. But there is an inner soul that searches for a way to express itself, typically with music. I think Jonathan knows something about that. But it can be also in very rational ways. In my case, it was with science, but I had already this intuitive tendency. And so it was not easy to adapt to the extremely rationalist environment. It was not easy, nevertheless, for me. And I suffered a lot. Yeah. Because I was not allowed to learn the things that I felt I should have learned at the time, I thought I myself, oh, I have a problem. It's in my brain that's not working. I meant no. Nowadays I know, in hindsight, I know that it is something inwardly that it tries to express itself. And our society still is not able to create the structures to enable this kind of development. And they even deny it. That's why I also said, I like very much this article of Elizabeth Klinski, who focused the center, said psychology still misses the soul. And she said, yeah, there is psychology, the transpersonal psychology. There is. Oh, I don't remember now. This is acid. Jolly as a jolly. Then another psychology. But even in that case, the soul, if it is addressed at all, it is usually seen as a static entity, not as an evolutionary entity. And that makes a complete difference because you will also act in the outer world when you don't have this idea of the evolutionary soul. Also, your educational practice will be. Yeah. Limited, unfortunately. So that's how I see it.
- [79:41]
Stefan Julich
Yeah. So I'm, you know, I'm. When I was brought on as, as core faculty in east west, one of the professors said, oh, you should really consider your teaching philosophy. Right. And my chair had said to me, the only thing that he was really concerned about above all other things with my dissertation was that I, that I understood how to apply the skills, the tools of scholarship to the work that I was doing. So there was, there was a particular technique or a set of techniques and skills that he wanted to see that I learned. And the deeper I got into that, the more I realized that this is actually forming me in some way and it not just informing my inquiry, but it's forming the inquiry and if I'm not careful, it can become a box. So when I, when I approach my students, I thought about this and I thought, really what I want, when I approach students is I want for them to disclose themselves to me in our interactions. And I want to be there for them so that they can open and blossom in the way that their soul is, is leading them to blossom. This is, it's, it's, it's complex and even complicated in a classroom, especially now that we're on zoom all of the time. But that's the attempt is to really allow the student to be the person they are more fully, to help.
- [81:12]
Marco Massi
To.
- [81:12]
Stefan Julich
Be a partner for them on their self inquiry, and then to help them get deeper into the subject that they're interested in. Because in east west, as Jonathan can tell you, people come from all over the place with many different backgrounds, and it's not a one size fits all program. So the depth and complexity and richness that appears in the classroom is extraordinary. Thanks for addressing this question of education and pedagogy. I think it's so important and it does seem to me that the world is requiring, considering how fast things are falling apart, the world is really requiring that we have a broader and more open perspective towards these things.
- [81:58]
Jonathan K.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, thank you, Marco. I mean, we've, we've gone, we've gone over an hour here and that's about our average, I think. So maybe we'll just end here and look forward to the next time that we can speak to you because there's so much more that we could discuss and I really appreciate you coming on to the podcast. It's been a really, really wonderful conversation and, and you're just so generous with your experience and wisdom. So thank you so much.
- [82:30]
Marco Massi
Yeah, thank you. It was my pleasure. Thank you.
- [82:35]
Jonathan K.
So until next time. See? See you two again.
- [84:10]
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