John Vervaeke

Summary

You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes: John Vervaeke Episode Summary

Release Date: November 20, 2024

In this profound episode of "You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes," comedian and host Pete Holmes engages in an intellectually stimulating conversation with John Vervaeke, a distinguished philosopher and cognitive scientist. Together, they delve into the intricacies of meaning, consciousness, cognitive processes, and the human experience, offering listeners deep insights into the modern "meaning crisis."

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1. Introduction to John Vervaeke and the Meaning Crisis

Pete Holmes begins by introducing John Vervaeke, highlighting his reputation as one of the most brilliant philosophers focused on meaning-making and recovering from the contemporary meaning crisis.

Pete Holmes [00:15]: "He's all about meaning, finding and making meaning and recovering from the meaning crisis that I think we can all feel so many times in our lives."

Vervaeke's book, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, serves as a cornerstone for their discussion, providing a framework to understand how individuals and societies grapple with a lack of meaning.

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2. Understanding Meaning: Coherence, Purpose, Significance, and Mattering

Vervaeke breaks down the concept of meaning into four essential dimensions: coherence, purpose, significance, and mattering. He uses the metaphor of a coherent sentence to illustrate how life's elements must align to create a meaningful existence.

John Vervaeke [31:22]: "Meaning is a metaphor... your life can't be absurd. It has to hang together in some way."

He emphasizes that while wealth can initially boost subjective well-being by alleviating poverty, it plateaus, making the pursuit of greater wealth irrational for lasting happiness. Instead, meaning in life—through connections, projects, and purpose—plays a crucial role in sustaining well-being.

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3. Educational Practices: Enlivening and Transformative Teaching

The conversation shifts to Vervaeke's innovative approaches to education. He critiques traditional teaching methods that may fail to engage students deeply and advocates for enlivening educational practices that make learning a transformative experience.

John Vervaeke [04:11]: "I want to presence their perspective. Some people have told me it's almost like a secular seance I'm trying to make."

Vervaeke discusses the importance of integrating storytelling, interactive dialogue, and experiential learning to foster genuine understanding and connection with students.

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4. The Flow State and Performance in Public Speaking

Exploring the psychological concept of flow, Vervaeke explains how entering this state of deep immersion can enhance performance and personal fulfillment. He relates this to Pete's experiences in comedy and public speaking, highlighting the mutual benefits of being fully present and engaged.

John Vervaeke [06:11]: "There's a tremendous capacity for self correction."

Vervaeke connects the flow state to achieving insights and maintaining a positive, adaptive mindset essential for navigating life's challenges.

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5. Cognitive Science and Predictive Processing

Vervaeke delves into cognitive science, particularly the predictive processing framework developed by scholars like Carl Friston and Andy Clark. He explains how the brain continuously makes predictions to minimize surprise, allowing for adaptability and learning.

John Vervaeke [49:58]: "Whenever you're making a prediction, you're taking a sample of information that's not the entire population of information available to you."

He discusses the balance between underfitting and overfitting in cognitive processes, emphasizing the brain's intricate mechanisms for pattern recognition and the implications for understanding human behavior.

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6. Humor, Absurdity, and Perspective Shifts

The dialogue explores the role of humor and absurdity in providing perspective shifts. Vervaeke and Holmes examine how comedic insights can alleviate the feeling of life's inherent absurdities, offering moments of clarity and relief.

John Vervaeke [38:03]: "Absurdity works from a perspectival clash... there's a shift in perspective and the absurdity is relieved."

They discuss the unique human capacity for humor as a tool for navigating complex emotional landscapes and fostering resilience.

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7. The Significance of Romantic Relationships

Romantic relationships are scrutinized as both sources of immense meaning and potential suffering. Vervaeke argues that societal expectations around relationships can lead to disillusionment, highlighting the importance of discerning between superficial satisfaction and deep, meaningful connections.

John Vervaeke [87:55]: "Romantic relationships are one of the primary sources of suffering in our world."

He advocates for viewing relationships as opportunities for mutual growth and understanding, rather than fulfilling unrealistic ideals.

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8. Mystical Experiences and Non-Duality

Vervaeke introduces the concept of non-duality, discussing how mystical experiences can lead to profound insights and a sense of oneness with the universe. He connects these ideas to various philosophical and spiritual traditions, emphasizing their role in overcoming the meaning crisis.

John Vervaeke [42:06]: "...non duality is the ultimate insight... See, how we have stereoscopic vision..."

The conversation touches on the transformative power of altering one's consciousness to perceive reality more holistically.

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9. Artificial Intelligence and Its Impact on Meaning

Addressing contemporary concerns, Vervaeke examines the role of artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) in the modern meaning crisis. He warns of the dangers posed by AI mimicking human interactions without genuine understanding or consciousness, potentially exacerbating feelings of isolation and meaninglessness.

John Vervaeke [101:04]: "LLMs don't have real relevance realization. They don't actually care about information, they don't protect what's true and good and beautiful."

He underscores the importance of human connection and authentic meaning-making in the face of advancing technologies.

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10. Conclusion: Integrating Wisdom and Authentic Connections

In closing, Holmes and Vervaeke reflect on the necessity of authentic connections and the pursuit of wisdom as antidotes to the meaning crisis. Vervaeke emphasizes the importance of overcoming self-deception and fostering personal growth through continuous self-examination and meaningful interactions.

John Vervaeke [119:35]: "When the mind opens up in wonder, reality discloses itself completely, completely coupled to it."

They encourage listeners to seek deeper understanding and maintain authentic relationships as foundational elements for a meaningful life.

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Key Takeaways:

• Meaning Over Wealth: While wealth can initially enhance well-being, sustainable happiness is rooted in meaningful connections and purpose.
• Transformative Education: Engaging and interactive teaching methods can foster deeper understanding and personal growth.
• Flow and Performance: Achieving a flow state can enhance both personal fulfillment and professional performance.
• Cognitive Balance: The brain's predictive mechanisms require a balance to avoid cognitive biases and facilitate accurate understanding.
• Humor as Therapy: Humor provides essential perspective shifts that help navigate life's absurdities and challenges.
• Authentic Relationships: Genuine romantic relationships contribute significantly to personal meaning but require realistic expectations.
• Mystical Insights: Non-dual experiences offer profound insights into the nature of reality and self.
• AI's Double-Edged Sword: Artificial intelligence poses challenges to authentic meaning-making, emphasizing the need for human connection.
• Continuous Self-Examination: Overcoming the meaning crisis involves ongoing self-reflection, authentic relationships, and the pursuit of wisdom.

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John Vervaeke's conversation with Pete Holmes offers a rich tapestry of philosophical and cognitive insights, providing listeners with practical frameworks to navigate the complexities of modern life and the enduring quest for meaning.

Transcript

[A]

You made it weird.

[B]

You made it weird. You made it with. Oh, yeah, you made it with. You made it weird with Pete Holmes.

[A]

What's happening, weirdos? This is John Vervaeke. Who is John Vervaeke? If you don't know, I didn't know. I was introduced to him by my friend James, who I love very dearly. And he said, john, excuse me. John is one of the most interesting and brilliant philosophers and thinkers that. That he's ever encountered. And that was enough. I was like, okay. He's all about meaning, finding and making meaning and recovering from the meaning crisis that I think we can all feel so many times in our lives. A lack of meaning. Human beings need meaning, and that is his trade. He has a new book called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It is available now wherever you. Whomever you get your books. And you can also check him out on YouTube. I listened to a series of his lectures on YouTube and I really, really enjoyed them as you are about to hear me gush and expound upon with him in this conversation. So I hope you enjoy. Not much to plug up top for me other than coming up. November 21st is my next Largo show here in Los Angeles. Always fun. That's where I try my new jokes and do some of the new hour favorites that I'm. It's so fun. It's the best show and the best time. Val always comes with me. We have incredible guests. We have music. So the next One is on November 21st in LA, followed by Indianapolis, Seattle, Portland on December 20th. We are shooting that for a special, so get tickets to the late show. Early show is sold out in Portland. December 20th. December 21st is Eugene, Oregon. That sold out. And then Phoenix, Arizona. All of those are available on Pete Holmes.com and we will be adding more dates shortly. In the meantime, enjoy this chat with the brilliant, the engaging, the wise, the fun John Vervaeke. Get into it. See, I've been listening to you and I love you. I think you're fantastic. Sorry, I just LA'd you. I said I love you, but you know what I mean. Like, I deeply resonated with and felt a kinship. That's a better way to put it.

[B]

I like that. That's great.

[A]

Yeah, right. Instead of being phony and all that. But the threshold of a house. So you get me in that place where I start thinking abstractly and symbolically and finding all this meaning. And when somebody explained to me that the threshold or like the mudroom of a house is to help you transition.

[B]

Right, right. Liminal yeah.

[A]

Yeah, that liminal space. Yeah. So that's. That's where you're finding me is. They did very well, but I was kind of rushing. Not rushing, but I had my daughter and my wife got, like, kind of attacked by the dog. Our dog. Not in a bad way, just sort of overwhelmed. He's a huge 111lbs. He can overwhelm me and I'm a giant. But so it was just like, when I'm doing something, I like it to be the only thing I'm doing.

[B]

Yeah, I know what you mean.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

It's almost spectrum y. I just. I don't like gear shifting. I don't want to be my mother's son and my wife's husband. I hate that. I'm just like, I hate this. And I don't want to be father and podcast host and I don't want to be comedian and friend. I'll never go to dinner before a show. I hate all those gear shifts. So anyway, I needed the magic mind and sort of.

[B]

Do you need a little bit more time?

[A]

No, I don't dial in. This is that time.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Verbal threshold.

[B]

Okay. Great, great.

[A]

Are you that way?

[B]

I'm like, yeah, very much. I don't like when worlds collide.

[A]

Yeah, it's the worst.

[B]

Now, it's interesting about me because by profession, I actually bridge between all the disciplines in the world, but like you, I like to keep things, like, focused.

[A]

It's the illusion. Well, people say that to me, too. They go, oh, you do so many things. And I go, if you saw my life, you would be bored to tears. Not really. It's like being a firefighter. There's moments of peak, adrenalized sort of stuff, but there's a lot of just staring into space. I loved what you said about our ability to write things down and then reflect and get an inventory of our minds. Oh, tell me what's up.

[B]

I brought you a copy of the book.

[A]

Oh, please. Speaking of the written word. Yeah, that's what triggered me exactly. But I love. I'm just going to keep going if you don't mind. What you're doing is. And I think this is a very high compliment because there is something sort of wizard, wizardly about this. Oh, awesome. Thank you so much.

[B]

You're welcome.

[A]

Awakening from the meaning crisis. Well, let's talk all about it. I'll put it right here so people can see it. You're an enlivening individual and. Yeah. Oh, I hope I'm glad you received that, because I think that's one of the best things you can do, is remind people of how many things. Not in an overwhelming way, but how many things are going on. Oh, right. I'm a product of my culture and my money and my language and. And living in California and being a white male or whatever it might be. I've inherited all these things that I've sort of confused as baseline, but really they're kind of all over the place and wild.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so, like, a good educator can really, like, enliven their students with, like, you know, when you see a good movie and you leave and your pupils are dilated and the whole world looks kind of like you're on a psychedelic.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

You're literally letting in more light.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Anyway, I'm very excited to be talking to you. I could be talking offshoot on all of that. How a camera lens is like a dilated people. Who cares? How are you today? There's so much going on. How are you feeling today?

[B]

Great. I mean, this whole thing has been wonderful. I mean, I've had just great podcast conversation after conversation. Good. And then with James, I had two live events yesterday, and live events are super jazzy because you have the people really there, and you can get the vibe and you can do the Q and A and everything. And so I've just been having an amazing time.

[A]

Well, that's. You talk a lot about the flow state.

[B]

Yeah, very much.

[A]

Public speaker, you know, making a video. We're making a video. But I. This is sort of. I think it's significant. Significant that Katie is here. And so there's a mini merging going on, but with a live audience. To your point about flow state, there's a. There's a. What do you.

[B]

What.

[A]

How do you phrase it? It's like failure is significant. Like. Yeah, if you matter.

[B]

Yeah, it matters.

[A]

And that is so essential to me as a comedian, is Right. If you fail, it'll hurt you.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

People say, how do you write so much? I go, it's a treadmill. Like, there's a consequence. If I stop, I'll fall off the treadmill. Like, I have to keep going.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But when I sit down to write a book, for example, much harder to motivate myself, unless you can really kind of. That's why I'm interested in the authors that do public readings of their work, because they want to imbue it with that. Those stakes. Like, whoops, that paragraph stinks.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

And you feel that fame. So you get that when you do a live event, you get jazzed very much.

[B]

Very much, very much.

[A]

And all those cues and it's a little.

[B]

Yeah. And people will often ask you questions that you haven't quite anticipated, and that makes you turn and look in a different direction, and I find that very exciting.

[A]

All my favorites say that. So James is. I'm like a non. Dual person. That's something I enjoy. And the teacher that I love the most is Rupert Spira. And he gets asked these questions, and I'm like, it's the most annoying question in the world to me. And the mark of the true teacher is that they seem to be lit up by it. Like what you just said. It's like, oh, you're making me think about it in a new way. Like, the doe has been reanimated, whereas I'm just like, will you shut up? That's why I'm not a spiritual teacher. I want to be like, shut up. I wrote a whole book about that. You have to be present and be. Allow. Allow a rediscovery, I guess.

[B]

Yeah. I aspire to be like Socrates, and he was always willing to go in and to question and to listen and to probe and to be opened up and to open other people up. So that. That's really what I. That, that. That. That inspires me on a daily basis.

[A]

Yeah, I love that. So this is what I thought. I don't normally come in and think, oh, that'll be a fun way to start and talk about springing it. It's not like that. It's not a challenge. I thought it would be interesting if you. With your. All of the different lenses you have, tell me what's going on here. What is this?

[B]

Okay. What is this?

[A]

Not just reality. I don't mean consciousness. I mean, like you, John, are my guest on a podcast. You could talk about what's going on with you personally. You have a projection of how it should go, whatever. Or you could talk about the framework. There seems something sort of the metaphor of it. I don't know, like, okay, you're my guest. Yeah, we're going to merge. You know what I mean? Sure, sure, we want to. What do we want out of it? I think it's a good microcosm of a good podcast, is a good little day, you know? So tell me, tell me. Don't let me lead you. I just thought, listening to you, I.

[B]

Was like, no, no, that's.

[A]

You could unpack. Being a guest on a podcast, driving here, what's going through your mind, however you want. To take that question.

[B]

Okay, well, I'll start. Because, I mean, well, what's going through my mind right now is. Well, I literally had the sentence run through my mind, hey, I like this guy.

[A]

Well, that we're sniffing butts, right?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

That's why I was like, oh, I'm very excited. I want to show. I want to demonstrate to you a certain level of, like, interest in all that sort of stuff to peacock to you so you can.

[B]

There's a musicality to you. Like, there's a. Like, your speech is almost like music. Like, there's rhythms and it's running up and down, and there's shifts in intonation.

[A]

Which is me trying to get you to do that, too, actually. I'm trying to enliven you.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Yeah. It's not a deliberate, but it's infectious.

[B]

And I'm picking up on it. And so. And what that's doing is it's drawing me out, and I'm. Well, I'm looking forward to interacting with you, and I'm very curious.

[A]

Right.

[B]

What is it? What does Pete want? What is he going to ask me? What's going to be the angle, the connection? Same.

[A]

That's a good episode. When you're looking forward to doing it, you have an expectation that it could be something special or spectacular. Here's a metaphor. Sweep you off your feet, kind of pick you up, swirl you around, and then we get left back.

[B]

I'm kind of now experiencing a bit of gratitude that this is going to be my final thing. It feels like a nice way of sort of. There's something, I don't know, sort of relaxing and flowy already about this interaction.

[A]

I'm glad. Well, loading up on you, I was like. I feel like I feel safe to introduce that sometimes. I fantasize. I'm like, before every episode, we should say, let's remember that we're going to die one day. Let's invoke the opportunity that we can share how many people might hear this, how long might this live, who might be touched, and all that sort of stuff. But sometimes it's too embarrassing to talk that way. People get weirded out. So keep going.

[B]

Well, I'm interested in how quick your. Your mind moves. And so what I'm considering is I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way. I usually. My mind moves very fast. I'm usually having to slow things down a little, the way it feels in my head, because I want to connect with my interlocutor. But I'm having a Feeling like, oh, no, no. This is going to be like when I'm sparring with somebody. I mean, in the good sense.

[A]

I know you do martial arts. Yeah, exactly. When I get off stage, my wife often goes, remember, they haven't heard it before.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

She's like. And that's not to say they're dumb. That's to say that the way my mind works when it gets excited is it starts going too quickly. And she's like, when you teach, or is that what we want to call it? I give a talk or.

[B]

No, I'm a teacher. Yeah, teacher. And I don't have fans or followers. I have students.

[A]

Okay, great, Perfect. So when you're teaching, I don't get the feeling of like, oh, this is a. This is going too fast. In fact, here's a really weird compliment I can give you. You allow for a five second, maybe I'm drifting and I can come back and I'm still. You're not going so fast that, oh, I gotta go back.

[B]

That's.

[A]

That sounds like maybe I'm throwing shade on you. Like, it's boring. That's.

[B]

No, no, no, no, no, no. I was taking that as.

[A]

I think it's a high compliment.

[B]

Yeah, I was taking it as an encouraging compliment because trying to get that cadence and trying to make sure the last thing I want to do is lose people. I seriously am not interested in sort of promoting my status. I really want to connect and so I want to make sure that I'm. You know, I talk a lot when I teach. A graduate teaching workshop, graduate students on how to teach. And I talk a lot about that, about, you know, really get into the rhythm and try to make sure it's show business. Yeah, it's a show. Oh. I tell them a big part of teaching is performance. I actually use that line.

[A]

Yeah, that was actually something I was excited to say to you because I was. I listened to the first three. I'm going to keep going. Which is itself its own type of compliment because there's the research umbrella. I'm researching my guest, but then just the enjoyment umbrella. I like to continue with the podcast. I think it's fantastic. But I was listening to it and there are these great lectures and I was like, yeah, comedians, tape specials. And this is optimum condition. My favorite venue. I'll have my coffee. I'll have my favorite. No, please. I'll have my meal, whatever it is that makes me so comfortable. I go out, it's my time. It's my birthday. And we film it and Then that is the representation when really comedy on the ground is sort of like, you know, clubs. Sometimes they're drunk, sometimes you're tired, sometimes you're jet lagged. But when I was thinking about it was with teaching. Why are we so anchored and weighed down bad? Anchored, like trapped with. And now the professor who might be going through a divorce is going to give that lecture when we could be doing a film like what you're doing. Like, here's a film where I presume you had your coffee and your right amount of sleep and you felt like doing it or whatever, or however you orchestrate it to the optimum. But that seems to be like a new approach to teaching. Instead of like the teacher, the professor giving the same lecture for the 500th time. They're not feeling it. It sucks. It seems like a better way to do it.

[B]

That's an excellent observation. I didn't come up with the idea. It was actually a student. A former student of mine approached me and said, like, the material you're doing in class, you gotta share it with the world. And my dad is a professional editor and I'm a professional videographer. We'll do it for free.

[A]

No way.

[B]

That's how it happened. And Alan Keon, and I'm forever grateful to him. But that's exactly right. Although I have to tell you, when I first was there, like a lot of people, I'll get comments. Is there anybody else in that room with you?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And there was nobody there. I had to. So when I was the very first lecture, it was like, whoa. Because I'm used. I was used to getting the vibe from my student. So I had to. I had to imagine students there. Wow. And as soon as I did then. And then I got what you were saying was like, oh, wow, this is a different. This is a different venue. This has a. This has a different potentiality, different possibilities.

[A]

It's what we're doing here.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I don't actively pretend that people are listening. I think that would make it different. And sometimes we do this live. And it would be not, in my opinion, not as good. It would be different. I'd be trying to be funny. We'd both be going for applause, like real time.

[B]

Right.

[A]

With Bill trying to like nail like aggrandizers almost basically. Can't help but I'm not surprised. So not only does it show business that you're speaking, but you're also acting. You're pretending like there's students there.

[B]

Yeah, I'm pretending there's students there. And Then I'm often trying to. For me, I don't want to just present the propositions of these thinkers. I want to presence their perspective. Some people have told me it's almost like a secular seance I'm trying to make. I want like, I don't want them to just hear Socrates. I want them to feel as if Socrates presence so they could start to see the world the way Socrates sees it.

[A]

A transmission. That's what they say in the spiritual.

[B]

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[A]

Like Ram Dass was a. Well, there's Ram Dass on the wall there. It doesn't matter. But he, his gift which I experienced, which is very non scientific, but what I experienced, I feel like I have to say that to you. But he could transmit his teacher and it was like a reliable phenomenon. I'm not really that into woo, but that of the short list of woo things I've experienced.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Someone that would like.

[B]

Yeah, I think there's probably. I mean my scientific reputation is I go into areas that have previously been taught, talked about as woo and I find a way of talking about them.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Scientifically. Yes, legitimately. And so I'm very open when people, especially when people are not sort of woo wee.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

They say, well, you know, generally no, but this. And then I'll go, okay, I want to think about that. I want to look at that, I want to investigate that.

[A]

Well, forgive me for queuing you up to repeat something, but the study about people, myself included, we love feeling like magical humans. I know when you're staring at me.

[B]

Oh, feeling of being stared at. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

But, but do you mind, I'll summarize it instead of burdening you. People were good at it, but then they noticed that if the, if the, what was happening was the scientists doing the study would tell them if they were right or wrong.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then what was happening was the scientist was unconsciously doing what they thought was a random pattern, which isn't a random pattern because we're very bad at being random. But we're also good at pattern recognition. So the subject who's blindfolded with earplugs is actually unconsciously tuning into the pattern that the experimenter doesn't know they're doing.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And if you stop saying if you're right or wrong, you're terrible at it.

[B]

That's right. It falls to chance.

[A]

That is. That sort of stuff lights me up. I thought that was so interesting.

[B]

Now the thing about that is. Notice what? I'm not, I'm not. I'm not trying to be dismissive, because what I'm actually pointing, pointing people to is you actually have this amazing power. You have this capacity for implicit learning. Without explicit awareness or effort, you can pick up on very complex patterns. And that's actually. This is Hogarth's notion. This is actually what's behind our intuitions. And then once you understand it scientifically, you can ask yourself, okay, what are the powers and the perils of this implicit learning? And what can we do to reduce the perils and enhance the power?

[A]

Which is a super exciting idea because you offered the example that a bigot has the wrong.

[B]

That's right. So the problem. One of the problems with its power is that it's implicit, so you don't have to load working memory. Right. And consciousness isn't filled, but. Right. What it. What that means is it doesn't distinguish between the kinds of patterns it's picking up on. So it doesn't distinguish causal patterns from merely correlational patterns.

[A]

Which they did on the Simpsons where Lisa says to Homer, look, dad, there's no tigers around. This rock is keeping the tigers away. And Homer says, it's perfect. He goes, lisa, I would like to buy your tiger warding off rock. He doesn't say warding off. That's a wrong.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I give a couple of examples of, like, large weddings are correlated with long marriages, but that doesn't mean making your wedding bigger will make your marriage last longer.

[A]

When you said that I had a relatively small wedding, and I was like, oh. But then when you explain that, it's because you have a social network. Social network and finances. So this is one of the things people don't like about science is it can be very like, y'all are apes. You know what I mean? It's like, it's a little insulting to our. You know what I mean? I don't think it is insulting. I think people can be insulted.

[B]

No, no, I take your meaning. Well, Pete. Yeah, And I mean, and to be fair to people who have that response, there is. There is a subpopulation of scientists who revel in a kind of arrogant. Rubbing people's faces in that kind of thing. And I'm very critical of that. I don't think that is the proper philosophical stance from which you should be practicing science. And the practice of a science is more important than the products of science.

[A]

Tell me what you mean, like how you. What you. Great power, great responsibilities?

[B]

Well, a little bit more than that. And this. This actually goes to the hallmark of what one of the defining Features that makes people rational. Right. The products of science will be obsolete. This is a very misargument by Larry Lauden. Almost all of our current, all of the previous theories have been shown to be predominantly false. So if we think we're going to get these perfect polished products, that that's what science is about and we glory in the products. We're actually, we're buying false gold. But if we say no, no, the science is like democracy. Democracy is actually, Winston Churchill said it great, you know, it's the worst government next to all the rest because in many ways it's less efficient and blah, and blah, blah. But democracy, what it has going for it is a tremendous capacity for self correction. And science, that's what it has going for it. The practice of science is a practice of self correction. But the attitude that is most, you know, most affording of that self correction is an attitude of humility and wonder, not an attitude of I know, and I'm gonna rub your face in it.

[A]

Right, that's, that's really interesting. It reminded me of. I'm not a person who says this, but I've heard people, I don't disagree with it, but they say God is a verb. Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's like science is a verb, meaning it's not really. And democracy is a verb. It's the chiding, but it's the moving forward. There seems something very. It's a paradox. It's like a rabbinical teaching. It's like at least we're moving forward.

[B]

Well, yeah, I mean, I think there are deeper reasons, maybe we'll get into later. But why the quest for a perfect final state, final solution, I use that word, that phrase advisedly. Right. Is actually a perennial sort of sin of humanity that we have to continually steer ourselves away from.

[A]

Well, we see that in our everyday life. I have a joke about this where I go, it's a theory that the reason why fish grew legs and walked out of the ocean wasn't because they were curious. It's because of the asteroid. Have you heard that the asteroid the size of Texas hit the planet like boils? The ocean makes them toxic. So the fish had to, it was like very unpleasant. And I'm like, I love that. We were born on the backs of catastrophe and we evolved. And now we walk around going like, why can't things be perfect? That's literally the cosmic joke. It's like you're here because a fish was being cooked in its own habitat and had to walk out. And then that became a guy in line at Starbucks going, like, why do they even have the mobile order app if it's not gonna. You know what I mean? That's the joke. But every day I rebel against my own emotions that I deem unpleasant and negative. And then we see it again and again. Not just the fish, but my personal growth comes from adversarial. You know, adversity is the word I'm looking for. And also, all the greatest feelings are on the other side of something that was challenging to you. You know, like, we don't just want to sit. Remember the movie Wall E?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

The big, heavy people and the motorized things drinking the slushies that taste like whatever they want. That is a sin. Meaning it's missing the mark. That's not life.

[B]

That's right. That's right.

[A]

Gilgamesh, you referenced. That's more like fumbling and failing and returning with a new perspective is more life than being in a massage chair. You're in.

[B]

Yeah. And think. I mean, the life metaphor is perfect because biologically speaking, it doesn't make any sense to ask, like, what's the final form that life is going to take? It's like, well, you don't understand biology, you don't understand evolution, you don't understand genetics.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You don't. Like, there can't be ever a final form of life. Life is the process of something that continually redefines and redesigns itself. That's what makes life life.

[A]

Right. And still, that's why it's so. I never tire of seeing the. I think we all love the very rich and the very famous being miserable. Don't you. Don't you think there's something kind of perennially true? It's like, look, Buddha leaving the kingdom we love, going like.

[B]

I think that without a significant amount of, well, like, existential dissatisfaction, the cultivation of wisdom is not gonna. Is not gonna. It's not gonna call to people. Yes.

[A]

Right. So would you say that one of the keys to a good life is learning how to surrender to and engage with things not being how we want them to be and recognizing that that's part of it.

[B]

Yeah. And my particular slant on that is to get people to discern. And spiritual discernment is. You know, many traditions emphasize this as central. Getting people to discern between things like pleasure, contentment, and meaning in life. And what will. What they. What they want, what they will. Well, what the research shows they will want as they confront deeper challenges or even as they confront their own death is the, you know, the markers of success and contentment and even the memories of pleasure won't be what gives you that sense of wanting to go on. It's the, it's the, it's the meaning in life that really. That really matters.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So. And this is, this is sort of at the core of my work, trying to get people to understand why this is so central and why it's so much at risk right now in our current civilization.

[A]

It's like the wrong things are on offer.

[B]

Well, yeah. So like, well, for example, let's do three. So wealth is only wealth is initially predictive of what's called subjective well being. Subjective wellbeing is, oh, I feel good. My life is good. So initially, you know, wealth. As you increase wealth, subjective well being skyrockets because people are getting out of poverty. Once people are reliably out of poverty, though, the curve flattens like this. And you have to do huge increases in wealth to make small differences and subjective well being. So the pursuit of wealth for the pursuit of subjective well being. Right. Becomes actually technically irrational. But subjective well being isn't the same thing as meaning in life. So I'll give you the quintessential experience in which subjective well being collapses and meaning in life goes up. Having a child. So when you have a child, it's like you're in a shipwreck. You're wet all the time. There's an alarm going off, you're never eating. The person that you thought loved you the most doesn't like you anymore. Right. You're sick all the time. Your finances are collapsing.

[A]

Underreported how you're just sick for three years. Yes.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

It's crazy.

[B]

Yeah. And then. And you ask people, well, why are you doing this? And they'll tell you, because it's so meaningful. And that's because children, children sort of satisfy the questions or the criteria you're looking for that constitute meaning in life.

[A]

Yes. Taking my daughter to Universal Studios, I used to go. I had. I don't know if you'd say later in life, but I was 38 when Lila. Is that right? Let's not stop and do the math. It was around there and I used to go to Universal Studios, you know, just as a single guy. And now I take her and I'm like, this is a completely different experience. You look back on that previous guide, you know, smoking weed and going to Disneyland, and you're just like, how depraved was that? Seinfeld has a great joke about that. It's like both sides. The childless, fun having and the Suffering children, having both look at the other and go like, that's insane.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

They both. And they're both right. And they're both wrong.

[B]

Right. Because subjective well being, you have to have subjective well being in a good life. I'm not some dour person. Yeah, but, but, but all I'm saying is don't confuse. Don't confuse wealth with subjective well being and don't confuse subjective well being with meaning. You need enough wealth to give you mastery over your environment so you're not continually under threat. Yeah, you need subjective well being because that's a marker that you're basically healthy. But you need meaning in life because that's the marker that you are leading the life that is cultivating good personhood.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard that the number is like something like $380,000. After. After 380. Hundred thousand dollars. I said $380,000. 300 would be 3 million. Anyway, that money becomes pretty irrelevant.

[B]

Yeah, the graph flattens. It literally plateaus. And so. And what typically happens is the extra wealth gets turned into projects that are generative generally of meaning in life.

[A]

Oh, like creative projects like this. So we get desperate and no shade here. Judd Apatow, one of my best friends and hero of mine, has reached a certain level where he's not worried about money. And then you see him bestowing that. He gave me a TV show. He gives Pete Davidson a movie, and they become like these sort of father figures that want to give it to the next generation. I have to imagine that's very meaningful.

[B]

It is. I mean, we can talk a little bit, if you'd like, about the science of meaning in life. So I'm not talking about the meaning of life. The meaning of life is a metaphysical proposal.

[A]

I'm glad you said that, because when I was like, oh, John Verveghi, he's the meaning guy. And then you started talking about it, I was like, compliment. This is far more interesting than I thought. I thought you were just going to be like, get out there and clap your hands. You got to exercise every day. Try to eat greens or something. It's not that at all. So I'm glad you're addressing this.

[B]

Yeah. There's a lot of science around this, and I'm privileged to participate in it. So there's sort of four dimensions to meaning in life. A good way of thinking about it is meaning is a metaphor. And we're saying there's something about the structure of our life, the structure of our experience, that's like the way A sentence works because sentences are literally meaningful. So what is it? Well, all the words have to cohere together. They can't be jumbled. They have to be in the right order. They have to be coherent. They have to make sense to you. And your life can't be absurd. Your life have to have a kind of coherence. There can't be that clash between perspectives that makes you feel that your life is absurd. It has to hang together in some way.

[A]

I wonder if that's why. Sorry to interrupt.

[B]

No, please.

[A]

I feel like you're, you know. You know what you're saying.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I do.

[A]

I feel like that's why, like, corporations and people often have, like, a mission statement that's very clean. Literally, they can distill themselves into something like they're trying for that coherence they want.

[B]

Yeah, because the coherence really matters. Now, the mission statement also shades into the second thing, which is purpose. Now, you have to be very careful about purpose. And this is another thing the culture is a little bit mixed up about. People confuse purpose with sort of a final goal. Right. Once I get there, I'll be happy.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And that's very problematic because if you don't reach it, then your life is meaningless. And then if you reach it and you continue to live, your life is meaningless.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So instead of thinking about, the word I prefer is orientation. You have, like, a North Star. You have something that orients you so you know how to, on a reliable way, navigate through the world, track your way through the world, then narrate your world, keep track of your tracking to yourself. So that's what purpose is. And contrary to what a lot of people think, purpose isn't the most important of these four factors. The next and the next two are sort of two sides of the same coin. The next is significance. You want there to be things in your life that are, like. Have, like, depth and reality and value to the. They're not superficial, they're not trivial, they're not ephemeral, they're deep. And then the last one, the one that matters the most, it's called mattering. And mattering is you want to be. So I'll start with the metaphor, and then we'll unpack the metaphor. You want to be connected to something larger than yourself. You want it to be connected. And now, obviously, people don't mean that literally. Like, if I chain you to a rock, you don't go, hey, oh, wow, this is great. So what. What do they mean? So the way of thinking about it is like this. Like when you're in a dream, you're in this little world and you think it's real. And then you move to a bigger world, right? And the bigger world allows you to see the flaws and the biases and the incoherencies of the smaller world and that bigger world. See, real is not like red. Real is like tall. It's a comparative term. And so the bigger is. I want to be connected to something that's more real. It's this wanting to be connected to more real. When people have mystical experiences, this is Yaden's work. And they talk about encountering the really real. They will change their professions, they will change their relationships, they'll change, they'll try and change their identity.

[A]

These are near death experiences. Psychedelic experience.

[B]

Psychedelic experiences. And what they do is they want to come into conformity with that. So that mattering, right. And the way you can ask yourself if you've got mattering and sort of significance, because they're sort of two sides of the same coin, is these three questions. What do you want to exist even if you don't? How really real is it? And how much, how much are you connected to it? And how much does it matter to you? Like, how much of a difference does it make to how you live your life? And think about how kids quintessentially satisfy that. Well, do you want your kids to survive when you aren't around? Of course you do. That's the project.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Are they really real? You better believe it. The one thing that can, if you aspire to be a good parent, the one thing that can reliably turn the arrow of egocentrism away from the super salient self to something else, is a kid.

[A]

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And do you want to be connected to your kid and do you want to make a difference in their life? And do they?

[A]

Of course, yeah. Right. Here's a good metaphor. These are my children. People say about their dogs, people say about their work, people say about their art. Yes, these are my children. Yeah, yeah. Because I sometimes feel that way about.

[B]

Some, some of my theories. You have a relationship to them. You go. Because you have to sort of let them go. You know what I mean? You have to stop owning them. You have to let them go into the world and have a life of their own.

[A]

My friend Kumail is married and he says he looks at his career like a dog. And sometimes the dog tears up the bedsheets and shits on them. And it's like his career can Be wild. And sometimes it brings bag, a bag of gold in its mouth and you just have to go like, that's the dog. But that's another way of looking at like.

[B]

Yeah. And so the thing that is important about this is people are finding it increasingly difficult to get that connectedness. So what's at the root of this mattering where we're using, like, the way when we say things matter to us, we're talking about, like, literally how we put matter inside of ourselves, like food or think of the word important import. I take it into me. I have to be connected to it. I have to literally participate in it. I have to be one with it. I have to get connected to it. And so people are finding it increasingly difficult to find sources that satisfy these criteria and give them this connectedness.

[A]

Yes. I can see why people are so drawn to you because you're really shining a light on one of those things that I'm like, why aren't we talking about this? Why aren't we talking about this? And my selfish, subjective way of relating to that is I feel so grateful that I found comedy. And I know there's no shortage of comedians talking about how great comedy is. It's sort of a podcast cliche. But when I'm driving home from a good show, you drive home from a bad show. It's a different flavor. But a good show, you feel all of the things you're talking about.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I feel like I ministered to people. I was of service and it's mutually beneficial. I was also served. We're all folded into each other. There's a real merging. I've said this a million times, but I'm going to say it to you to see what it makes you think of. It's like good comedy. The audience, the group of strangers, merges into something called an audience or classroom. They merge.

[B]

Yeah. You get a wee space, a we. That's something above, beyond just adding all the individuals up, which is why a.

[A]

Heckler or a shitty student is so offensive. You're fucking up something for everybody else. Everybody. Which is why if I say shut the fuck up, everyone will cheer. Whereas that's like, you know, that's an unkind thing to say.

[B]

Normally, it's rude. It's rude. But in that circumstance, people, we can be very pragmatic.

[A]

We're like, they're right. They're slowing us down.

[B]

They're shattering a spirit that is giving, that's taking life there, right?

[A]

That's right. Well, it's a person at a magic show that goes. There's a mirror.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I'm trying to forget my life, you know what I mean? Like, I wanted David Copperfield to fly.

[B]

So I got to meet John Kees, John Cleese, I should say, at a. At a conference. He. He. He really liked my work.

[A]

Oh, wow, cool.

[B]

Really interesting. And we talked a little bit. He. He and Ian McGilchrist, who's a friend of mine, they were talking and I got to talk to them a bit about comedy. And I was. And I want to try something out on you, because with me. Yeah, you're a comedian. So one of the things I've talked about is. So let's go back to absurdity. And of course, you don't want your.

[A]

Life to be absurd.

[B]

Yeah, right. Monty Python. Right. Absurd. Absurd comedy. There's this line between absurdity and comedy. Give me a moment, please. So absurdity works from a perspective, a perspectival clash. Like, so here we are, we're in this perspective of the everyday, and you and I are living our lives. But if we zoom out to a cosmic perspective, our lives, the clash can make our lives feel insignificant and small. That. And that's absurdity. You get that perspective of a clash. The thing about humor is it seems like it's threatening with a perspectival clash. Right. It's like. It's almost like there's absurdity is going to be there, but then there's an insight in which there's. And there's a shift in perspective and the absurdity is relieved and people go. And I think it's. It's. I think one of the reasons why, like, we seem to be the only species that does humor and comedy, although we seem to get a little bit of humor in chimps.

[A]

They tickle each other.

[B]

Yeah, they tickle each other and they can find. If one of them. They seem to have, like, slapstick humor. If one of them falls and they might laugh.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Right, but. Right, but did you see what I'm getting at?

[A]

I want help understanding. I get the first part. One of my favorite memes online is it's you, and then it's the Earth, and then it's the Milky Way, then it's all the. All the galaxies, and then there's a giant Jesus, and he's saying, don't masturbate. It's good. Right?

[B]

Okay.

[A]

That's absurdity.

[B]

That's. But you see. But the absurdity gets relieved because. Right. Because it wraps us back into our everyday lives.

[A]

It drops you off at Home.

[B]

Right, right, right, yeah, yeah.

[A]

So it's taking you out for a reason. And we're going like, I don't like this. And then it's going like, look, your life is out there, too. This space here in this room is the same space in between the rings of Saturn. You know, like, that's insane. The properties are different, but the space, the quality of it is the same.

[B]

There's a family resemblance. I don't know if you knew that term from Wittgenstein things, they're similar, but that doesn't mean they all share exactly the same property.

[A]

I see.

[B]

Yeah, there's a family resemblance.

[A]

John, lower your. Microsoft, people that want to see you. Keep going.

[B]

There's a family resemblance. And like in, in the, in the, in the, in the. In the cognitive psychology and the cognitive science, between humor, insight and magic tricks, they all are doing. Yeah, they're doing very similar things. And see, this is. This is. I think we like to. We have evolved to. Serious play is a developmental engine. This is. Right. And we have. We have evolved to seriously play with this perspectival clash in this. Right. Because perspectival knowing is so important to us.

[A]

Completely agree. And I've interviewed a lot of magicians and we always bond over similarities. And remember in the movie the Prestige, Christopher Nolan's movie, they talk about it. Obviously, magicians talk about it as well. If you don't have the Prestige, which is the bird comes back, I show you a cage, I flatten it. That's not a trick. The bird has to come back.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

That's Jesus at the end of the cosmos.

[B]

That's right. That's right.

[A]

Because I bring you back.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

So it's also like Gilgamesh. It's like a little journey. It's a little, little.

[B]

And that's what an insight problem does. Right. An insight problem is you're in the wrong perspective. You're like, oh, oh, I thought she was angry, but she's afraid.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And then like. And you realize you framed it wrong and the wrong things were salient and relevant and now you're reconnected and now you realize you were going off track and now you brought it back in.

[A]

A powerful way and that. So you talk about the shamans and the mystical experience. Experience and the dreams and all that sort of stuff getting us out of the box.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's funny, I was listening to the nine dot problem, so I don't know the solution. I was just listening to you Do I can. You don't have to do it. I'm sure you've done it a million times. But what I was interested in is I've had the psychedelic experience. Literally like taking a psychedelic and seeing. My friend Ron Funchett says it's like you're a rat in a maze and something picks you up.

[B]

Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about. Oh, tell me because I think, I mean in the book and in. I'm writing a book now on the cognitive science of religion. I'm teaching, not a graduate level course, a fourth year seminar course on it. I think non duality is the ultimate insight. Non duality is to take the. To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven and a wildflower, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand and spend eternity in an hour. It's where you get like. You know how we have stereoscopic vision and we like. If you do this with your eyes, your finger moves because your brain actually fuses the like the two fields of vision you get depth. We can have these perspectival insights in which the grain of sand and all of reality we can stereoscopically see through that and that when we can get to that, that alleviates any possibility of cosmic absurdity. That's the thesis.

[A]

I love that because Jesus standing there at the end of the cosmos in the meme that we both love. Now I don't know that viewer on the edge of the. I can't quite say it, but I'm trying to say the same thing you're saying. When we can look at the grain of sand in the non dual understanding which I wasn't even sure we would get into, but I always love talking about it. It's like we would say that the grain of sand I I the big eye consciousness imbue the grain of sand with its reality. Like I lend it its reality that this is Rupert Spirey. He goes. The grain of sand is known by consciousness, but ultimately it's made of consciousness. There's nothing else that is to it. There's perceiving and there's touching and so like we're the same. And we're the same. Sometimes I'll take a moment to just consider that in your inner reality you're the same sort of sh that I am. You've added all these different things but there's a real love, compassion increase when I just consider especially someone that I don't like or agree with is the same space that I am. I went away from the grain of sand. But I'm not quite qualified to explain that.

[B]

No, no, but I get what you're saying. That ability to. I mean. And what's interesting is what's. And part of what I'm hoping to share.

[A]

Yeah, tell me.

[B]

It's not just me. Is like there's a growing convergence between sort of cutting edge cognitive science and, you know, and for lack of a better term, these mystical wisdom traditions that are about, you know, what's happening in altered states of consciousness. What's the nature. What's the nature of our cognitive connection to reality.

[A]

Okay. An area that's very interesting to me and I'd love your take on it, given this four year whatever you said. That's not a graduate course.

[B]

Fourth year.

[A]

I think it's so interesting that at night we go to sleep and we manufacture worlds and we centralize ourselves as a character in that world.

[B]

Yeah. There's a really good theory emerging about what's going on there.

[A]

Tell me.

[B]

Okay, so part of my work is to integrate two really big frameworks called. Well, three big frameworks actually called predictive processing, relevance realization, and what's called 4e Coxi. Maybe we'll get into that, maybe we won't. But the predictive processing framework, which is the brilliant work of Carl Friston, Andy Clark, my beloved colleague Mark Miller with me at the University of Toronto, is the idea that whatever else the brain is trying to do, it's trying to reduce being surprised. Now, it will allow itself to be surprised short term if it benefits it long term. Like a good joke.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Or a magic trick.

[A]

Right. Oh, isn't that. That's what we're doing. Yeah. We're going, I know there's a mirror over there, but there's a gain.

[B]

Yeah, that's right.

[A]

That's reality.

[B]

Right. Because we get better. We get better at reducing threats to surprise by practicing locally.

[A]

Being threatened by which is Disneyland too. Let's go practice being scared.

[B]

It's a birthday party. Or birthday party.

[A]

Yeah. Surprise. All these things are rehearsals.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

For the nonsense out there.

[B]

Right.

[A]

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[B]

And so now you face, your brain faces a problem. So whenever you're making a prediction, you're taking a sample of information that's not, I'll use a technical term, it's not the entire population of information available to you. Now, you have two problems you're facing, Right. One problem is it's called bias, which is a bad naming because it gets confused with bias. Yeah. So I'll use another term which is really good, underfitting, which means you're missing patterns in your sample that actually are in the population. You've missed them. But the other is called overfitting. Overfitting is when you found patterns in your sample that aren't actually in the population. You mistake, you don't miss, you mistake patterns in your sample for in right, my brain.

[A]

This is how brains work. Which is worse? Who cares? Just keep going.

[B]

Well, the answer is, there is no final answer as to which is worse.

[A]

They're just both bad.

[B]

And it depends on your environment. And that's to do with the technical paper I just published recently. But here's the thing. One of the theories, it goes back to Robert Carhart Harris that both dreaming and psychedelics are doing is what you do when you're okay. We have neural networks at the heart of ChatGPT4, artificial general intelligence. Right. What they're doing is they're picking up. And the problem is there's such good pattern detectors that they regularly overfit to the data. Our brains are super neural networks, and they reliably overfit to the data. What you do with neural networks is you periodically shut off half the nodes or you throw static into them. Because what that does is it actually. It's like. It's like I'm wearing blinders.

[A]

You want blinders? Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And you take off, you break that frame. And what it does, is it like. Like the nine dot, you break out of the square.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And it breaks the brain free so that it's open now. It releases it from overfitting to the data. And now it can now explore possibilities.

[A]

I've heard that. Explain that. Psychedelics. Your brain is always prioritizing what's important and what's not. And you're.

[B]

That's like realization. We'll have to talk about that.

[A]

Okay, that psychedelics go stop. And that's why you can look at dust on your floor for six hours.

[B]

Yes, exactly. And what it does is psychedelics are sort of massive frame breaking and that. And I think it's part of my responsibility to tell people that that means that they have a tremendous power. They're like a chainsaw. And like a chainsaw, there's a danger to them too. See, psychedelics put you in a state that's technically called epistemic vulnerability. Which means, like, I've broken out of the bad frame, but that doesn't mean I've found a good new frame.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I've taken off my glasses and maybe I've seen all the smudges on them, but that doesn't mean I've put a new pair on.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And so this is why the four S's are really important. You've probably heard the first two. They're Timothy Leary set, setting, set and setting you. So you have to have the right mental framing, the right mental set. You have to have the right people around you to have.

[A]

My rule is that you should be comfortable crying or vomiting in front of them.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. And they have to be credible. They have to be people whose perspective on you you find reliable.

[A]

You're so right. You just brought back a very vivid memory. Sometimes I'm not a huge psychedelic person. People might be laughing, meaning I don't do them constantly. But it's been a while since I've done a full trip. But what I'm saying is I remember taking mushrooms with two friends and I was like, I don't trust these people. Like, immediately I realized I was being phony even hanging out with them.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

No, and see that epistemic vulnerability, this is if you don't have. Right. Set and setting. I'll get back to the two other S's in a second. Right. Psychedelics aren't physiologically addictive. But that epistemic vulnerability opens you up to get addicted to you. Whatever rabbit hole, weird, messed up metaphysics, conspirituality that you're going to get locked into. So this is why you need the other two. The next one's a little bit technical, but it's sapiential. This is a highfalutin word. Sapiential. Homo sapiens.

[A]

I was gonna say sapien. Yeah. What does that mean?

[B]

What it means is you've got a bunch of practices for cultivating wisdom again. Well, wisdom doesn't mean something. Arcane wisdom means how many. How much. How much of a. How much of a systematic set of practices do you have for reliably challenging self deception?

[A]

Okay, so Judd Apatow we just referenced told his story about doing. I haven't done ayahuasca. He did ayahuasca. And I asked him about it right after and he was like, bring all of your tools.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And I was like, I hadn't heard anyone say that. But all of that, like, you have to. How you doing in there?

[B]

Like, mindfulness practices. Rational, reflective. Reflective.

[A]

Yes. This too shall pass.

[B]

All of that you need all of that you need your emotional regulation practices.

[A]

Yes, all of them, big time.

[B]

And then third story you need. And this is what's becoming clear in psychedelic therapy and psychedelic research. You need a bigger story that tells you how to integrate this into your comprehensive worldview.

[A]

I firmly agree when I, meaning I have a personal experience with that. The first time I did mushrooms, the big takeaway was, oh, this is why all the myths and metaphors, like, we needed those.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

I thought they were stupid. And then I had that experience and I was like, I have nowhere to put this until I had those.

[B]

Think about this, Pete. A reliable estimate is around 40% of the population without any, necessarily any kind of substance ingestion or doing ritual dance during anything, have these powerful, anomalous experiences.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And part of the meaning crisis is they don't have a. They don't have those four S's whereby they can properly integrate those experiences.

[A]

And then what happened? I mean, like, you kind of alluded to it, someone having a psychic break. And I say that with respect.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Sounds very similar to someone on lsd. Like, if you've ever chatted with A homeless person, an unhoused person, as I have at the 7:11 over there. And he starts telling me that the tree is talking to him, and he and the tree are the same thing. It's an old Ram Dass joke. He visited his brother in the psych ward. His brother said, I'm Jesus Christ. And Ram Dass is like, me too. But I don't think we mean that in the same way.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's.

[A]

Isn't that what we're talking about?

[B]

Yeah. I mean, part of a. Part of, I think, transformative experience, Ellis Paul's work is we have to go through that moment of profound epistemic vulnerability. But when people have this and they don't have the four S's that we just been talking about, they will latch onto whatever will help them not go into absurdity, whatever will help reorient them. They will. They will give. They will go for anything that gives them those. For meaning in life, things. Right. And this is why conspirituality can also be driven by psychedelic use. And people go in and conspirituality is.

[A]

I love that word. I haven't heard it before.

[B]

I thought my friend Julian Evans, but he said he didn't come up with it, although he's popularized it. It's a fusion of conspiracy theory and spirituality.

[A]

Well, that's what's so great about it, is I got it immediately, and I think we're all excited to know it. That's really cool. But you're vulnerable is what's happening.

[B]

You're vulnerable. You're very vulnerable.

[A]

You blew open all your windows and doors.

[B]

So if.

[A]

And you'll close them with any nail and hammer you find. Right.

[B]

So if people hear one thing I'm saying in the. In this discussion is don't think the psychedelic drug in and of itself is your salvation.

[A]

Couldn't agree more. My wife Val, we're open about this. She overdid it. I'm much bigger than her. I don't know what it was, but we. We both went on a couple journeys together, and she. This is our guess, like, depleted her. What's the word? Dopamine. All of that stuff was at zero. And she was like a shell of a person for a frightening long amount of time.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I was like, oh, this is no joke. It's no joke.

[B]

It's like a chainsaw. You don't give a chainsaw to a child.

[A]

No, that's absolutely right. And my wife is a child. I'm just kidding. The transitive property. You Just called my wife a child. I'm just kidding. But I'm totally with you. Reverence and respect and all of those sorts of things. And what's strange is I felt like I kind of went about it backwards. I didn't do it in the ideal way. I had my brain, my being, whatever, blown open. I got a taste. It was a mild dose. Looking back, I like split what was probably like a full dose with somebody. So people would probably laugh at how mild it was. But it was very profound for me. And then I reverse engineered. I went. Then I found Joseph Campbell. I found myth and metaphor. Then I started to kind of reframe my religious upbringing. Which is one of the great thrills of my life is kind of finding how the things that I was raised with have some wisdom in them.

[B]

Please. One of the aspirations of my work and people tell me it does. This is like if. If my. If my work lets you return to Christianity or re. Home yourself in Buddhism or whatever.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That thrills me.

[A]

Well, that's. It's Gilgamesh. Sorry to keep mentioning.

[B]

That's fine. That's fine.

[A]

But it's leaving home.

[B]

It's good company to be in.

[A]

It's leaving home and then returning home with a new perspective. But that's every hero's journey as well. Returning to the village with the new. Returning to the shire. Except in the books where the shire is.

[B]

One thing I want to say. And this sort of a criticism of sometimes of Campbell. It's important to remember that the Greeks paired hero myths with hubris myths. That for every myth of the hero there's a myth of hubris.

[A]

Yeah. But that's. I'm going to start. That doesn't get. That's not going to sell. Shush. I'm just kidding. From a marketing perspective. You've just like. If you were on Shark Tank, they'd be like, you just alienated half of the population. Nobody wants that. But you're right. It needs to be balanced.

[B]

Right. Because this is Plato's great insight. Plato's great. I mean, at the core of Plato's philosophy. I'm going to use the Greek word because the English word tension is largely negative for us. But the tonos of a bow. The tension of a bow or the tension of a. Of a guitar, like, it's. It's that positive sense of tension.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

There's a ton of. Between our finitude and our transcendence. We are subject to finitude. We fail. We screw up. We do things for which we are ashamed and feel Guilty.

[A]

Well, that's classic Christianity. Well, part of it, I think God doesn't suffer. Jesus is being bled out and water is running his body, but he has to suffer both.

[B]

He's right. And I think this is why Christianity and Platonism went like this to each other. And you get Christianity wedded to Platonism, like, right in. Right. Like you get it right in the Gospel of John.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But Plato says, but if you only identify with your finitude, you bestialize yourself, you become an animal, you fall into despair, you're a subject. You become servile, you're subject to other people. We are also capable of being trothed, like betrothal troth to transcendence. Right. So we can also write the Epic of Gilgamesh. We can write the Seventh Symphony by Beethoven. We can write the Dunio Eliage by Wilker. And this is. And this is. And Plato says, but if you identify just with your transcendence, you'll fall prey to hubris and you'll become a tyrant over other people. And he says, what you have to do in order to preserve your human dignity is to keep atonos between your finitude and your transcendence. And I think the Incarnation, the Christian myth. And I don't use myth in a pejorative sense. I use it the way Campbell used it. I sometimes even use the Greek word mythos to make sure I liked your definition.

[A]

It's something perennial. Yeah.

[B]

Myths are not false stories about the past. They're current stories about perennial problems.

[A]

Right. And they're. So you soak them right up. You know them when you hear them.

[B]

Yeah. And it goes right in and they touch us. And so I think the incarnation is a way of, like, saying. Like ultimate reality is actually saying the tonos between finitude and transcendence is something you need to radically identify with. And you identify it with it most. Most. When you express agape love, divine love, one of the gloves. I mean, there's Eros, which is the love of being one. It's not necessarily sexual love. You can have Eros for a cookie. Ye want to be one with it.

[A]

I've had some.

[B]

But mystical oneness is also a kind of Eros.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Philia is what you and I are enjoying right now. It's the love that is born out of reciprocity, fellowship, that can become friendship, kinship. Yes. Okay. Didn't want to affinity at least.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And that. But think about. Agape is the love you have for a child. You. The project with your child is not an erotic child. That erotic project. That's creepy and weird. In fact, the project is for your child to become independent from you. Right.

[A]

Oh, my God. It's so. Look, it's weird that I'm a parent, but it's incredibly selfless. Let's say when I watch my wife do it to take me out of it, because that's a little too transcendent. Yeah, no, I'm just saying, like, when I watch my wife put everything aside. Or you're like, that's a sp. That's agape.

[B]

That is. That's agape. And it's not friendship because this little. This little thing you bring home from the hospital, obviously morally it's a person to kill. It would be immoral, but cognitively, it's not a person. You can't go out and party with it. You can't talk with it. It can't be your friend, but you love it. Because if you love. Well, I mean, my greatest aspiration is to love wisely and to be trustworthy of love. Because if you love wisely, your children, it's like a magic power. It's like if I could stare at this, it would become a Ferrari. Like, you turn this being into a real alchemy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

It's real magic.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. You turn you. You. You turn them into a. Like a moral, cognitive, legal, meaning making person.

[A]

And better than us.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

You know, it's. You look at a lot of being a parent who's recognizing that my parents did the best they could and they did better than their parents, you know, like, even if it's microscopic.

[B]

So agape is right. Agape is right. Finite transcendence in action. Because agape is a God power. That's the transcendence. But it's about our finitude. It addresses our finitude. Wow.

[A]

It's both.

[B]

It's both. And see, this is the great thing that Christianity brought Christianity says to. Like, so Christianity says to the Roman people of the Roman Empire, all you people that. All you. All you that have been declared non persons, all the slaves, all the women, all the sick, all the children, all the ethnic groups that are not Roman, come here. We have a way of life that will turn you into persons. Think about how that is the dignity.

[A]

And the inherent love. Yeah, exactly right.

[B]

And they stay. You see, a lot of people get converted to Christianity because during the plagues, everybody leaves. And the Christians stay.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

The Christians stay and demonstrate agape to the people who are sick.

[A]

Wow. It's. What it brought to mind was I thought it was funny when the Christians chided against Harry Potter, because I'm like, it's the same story.

[B]

It's.

[A]

Your parents are wizards.

[B]

I mean, that's. You know, to quote St. Paul, that's a concern for the letter and not the spirit. Right.

[A]

Yeah. I didn't know that was a Paul quote.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Well, okay. I've been saying the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Of course it is.

[B]

I think. I think he. I think it's also by Jesus of Nazareth, too.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Of Nazareth.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, it's so cool how many times. But the tension. I feel like I'm living that tension. Like, meaning I've tasted.

[B]

I think when you do.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I think you start to properly inhabit your humanity.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And those four things we talked about, meaning of life, all those connections, real connectedness to yourself, to other people, to reality. I call it religio, because that's a Latin word for to reconnect.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. Right. And it's just one of the etymological ligament. Yeah. And also you do it. And religion. I was going to say religion.

[A]

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I learned that from Richard Rohr. I just cite my source.

[B]

Well, it's a good company. Again, he's wonderful.

[A]

That's his hat right there. See that white hat behind you? Oh, that's his hat.

[B]

He gave it to me. You've met some wonderful people.

[A]

I know. It's a gift.

[B]

I think when we inhabit that. I think when we inhabit the tonos of our finite transcendence, and then we live from that. With agape. With agape and logos. Right. Then we are in the orientation that affords that religio that gives us meaning in life.

[A]

Well, I was gonna say. Which comes first? The reason why I can love my daughter with agape.

[B]

Agape comes first.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You're. You. You weren't. You're. You wouldn't be here without agape, that's for sure.

[A]

But I'm wondering, like, what. What it brought up to. Brought to me is, like, it's so hard to love, it's so hard to stay when the plague is here. Right. And with my daughter, I have a.

[B]

Go ahead, please. Oh. Oh, tell me. So this is the thing. These are. And this is the deep influence of my friend Dave, David Schindler, in his reading of Plato. His book, Plato's Critique of Impure Reason. Absolutely. The best book on Plato's Republic.

[A]

Really strong.

[B]

I can't recommend it strongly enough. His book on love in the postmodern predicament what's his name again? DC Schindler. David Schindler. DC Schindler.

[A]

And he wrote. Okay, the Plato one.

[B]

Yeah. And so. And then I'm going to make use of another philosopher, the philosopher who wrote the important essay on bullshit also wrote a really good book called Reasons of Love. Reasons for Love. And he talks about the way love is really interesting. It's a voluntary necessity. Like he talks about. Like he talks about the unthinkable. So I used to live with my son and I can think in one sense. I can form the pictures and run the propositions to my head. I should kick my son out because then the house, the apartment would be clean. I'd have more food, I'd have more money. But I can't actually come like I'm constrained. I can't actually get to make that a live option for me. There's a necessity, but it's not a necessity that I feel imprisoned by. It's a voluntary necessity. Love is a voluntary necessity. Now here's the brilliant point, and this is Plato's point. Reason and beauty are also voluntary necessities. And there's a deep interconnection between love, beauty and reason telling. So this is the thing. So let's talk a bit about beauty then.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay, so first of all, you have to give up sort of our what? Han, in the book Saving Beauty talks about how we basically trivialized and we've basically almost turned beauty into something pornographic. So he talks about the aesthetic stimulating. Yeah, he talks about the aesthetics of the smooth. It's smooth, it's easy to touch and it easily gratifies us. And it possesses no challenge for us.

[A]

Can I say that's why it's grotesque to have a massage chair in your living room. There's something wrong. Hot tub in your basement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is my mom being a snob. I don't know. This episode is brought to us by our friends at Apollo. Of course I'm wearing my Apollo Neuro right now. Apollo Neuro is a piece of wearable tech that sends almost sub perceptual depending on the setting you put it on. I have it nice and low that you almost don't even really feel. But your body senses, specifically your nervous system interprets these vibrations that the Apollo sends out. This is science back. This is not woo woo. And interprets it that your body is being held, that it's being calmed down. It's basically a wearable hug for your nervous system developed by a board certified. Excuse ME certified psychiatrist and a neuroscientist who have been studying the impacts of chronic stress in humanity in humans for nearly 15 years. Apollo's effects on stress, sleep, cognitive performance and recovery have been proven in multiple clinical trials and real world studies. And you can get 40 bucks off and support our show by going to ApolloNeuro.com weird and using promo code weird. It can help you focus, it can help you sleep. It really is wonderful for sleep, help you wind down. If I'm in the car and I realize I'm just stressed, there's literally a setting called calm that just sort of establishes a rhythm on your body and gently lulls you back to the state that you want to be in. It can be worn on the wrist or the ankle. ApolloNeuro is like finding the fuse box for your emotions. Basically energy social clear and focus. Rebuild and recover. Unwind, fall asleep. A chemical free way to lull yourself asleep and to stay asleep. Because it's smart. It actually will rerun the program while you're asleep, helping you stay asleep. It's a game changer. Go to ApolloNeuro.com weird and use promo code weird for 40 bucks off. That's a P O L L O. Anyuro.com weird use promo code weird. We're also brought to us by our friends at Roosevelt's. If you've seen me on TV lately, whether it was a late night show, after midnight, whatever it might have been, I am most likely wearing a Roosevelt shirt because they are an apparel brand that I absolutely adore. They have a passion for pop culture and Americana and also just some classic designs that look fantastic, feel fantastic button down shirts that I actually don't mind wearing. If you've been seeing me perform live lately, I'm wearing a Roosevelt's. The team at Roosevelts have designed bold, fun designs that have unique rad concepts. They are, they have something for everybody. They have big Lebowski prints, they have Star wars prints, Disney, Nickelodeon. Conversation starters Having a hard time talking today. Conversation starters for when you're at a party. Show people what you're into. Let them know you're into the office before you even speak. And if your style is a little bit more laid back, they have stuff for you too. That's. That's mostly what I wear. I love their classic stuff and I also love their really fun stuff. It is moisture wicking. It is light, soft, stretchy and fits so damn nice. Made from their signature Kunaflex four way stretch material. They have shirts for everyone. Jurassic park worn. I Just throw in another one. Jurassic Park. They won't shrink or wrinkle after washing. That's true. That's one of the reasons I love touring with these shirts. I travel with them. They also have hats, bomber jackets, hoodies and shorts. You will never want to take these clothes off. So check them out. They're based out of Hoboken, New Jersey, so how could it. How could they be anything but rad clothing for the bold and for fun for those who dare mighty things just like their namesake, Teddy Roosevelt. Go to SVLTS. Who has time for vowels these days? Roosevelt at RSVLTS on Instagram. Or check them [e-mail] Support your look and support this show. Back to the episode.

[B]

But Rilke says that beauty is an angel that could kill you, but doesn't.

[A]

Wow. Yeah. That's beautiful.

[B]

Right. And so what we have. Why do we have this? I mean, there's all kinds of marketing reasons and capitalist reasons. So I'm not claiming this is a sole reason, but the philosophical, psychological reason why we have this pornographic reduction of beauty is because we're beset by what Paul Ricour calls the hermeneutics of suspicion. Hermeneutics is how you interpret things. And so we've been taught by Freud and Marx and Nietzsche that to be cynical in the pejorative sense, everybody has a secret agenda. Appearances are always misleading. Behind us, the secret agenda, the secret motive.

[A]

Selling.

[B]

Right, Right. And what. And the problem with that is that's ultimately, it's not that that doesn't happen in instances, but that can't be generally the case. Remember when I said that realness is a comparative. Something is an illusion only in comparison to something that is more real. To say everything is an illusion is like saying everything is tall. Doesn't make any sense.

[A]

Yeah. It's relative.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It only exists in relationship.

[B]

Right, Right. So the hermeneutics of suspicion is actually totally dependent on situations where appearances don't distract or distort reality. They actually disclose reality when appearances disclose reality. So we are attracted to the realness that's beauty.

[A]

Wow. It doesn't have an agenda.

[B]

That's right. And Plato made this wonderful connection between that voluntary necessity of love and beauty. When we love something, we find it beautiful. And we'll. And we'll love it because we find it beautiful. There's this weird loop, like, frequently, like, you know, you know, I fell in love with this woman who is the profound love of my life. And what was different for me? Give me a moment. Because this could sound Initially insulting. And I don't want to insult her. Right. Before, I had always followed my sort of salience. Salience is how things grab your attention. I'd followed my salience radar and I was attracted to a woman and I'd get involved with them and I kept screwing up. I kept having disastrous.

[A]

It reminds me of how people are bad at recognizing patterns, but they think they know.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

You were blinded by. You had a self deception going.

[B]

Exactly. I was bullshitting myself in Frankfurt's sense.

[A]

And so many us are, by the way.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

I mean, maybe all of us, I don't know.

[B]

So I, I said I'm not gonna follow my type.

[A]

You did the George Costanza.

[B]

Yeah. I'm not, I'm not gonna look for my. The type I'm always attracted to.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I met a woman who was not my type. And I fell in love with the beauty of her soul.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And then I stepped back and I realized, oh, she's turning heads on the street. She. My God, she's a physically beautiful woman. And I'm so grateful that it happened that way. And now what I consider a beautiful woman is what approximates sorrow.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

See, beauty can sometimes cause.

[A]

Reveal itself later.

[B]

And also there's a weird loop. We can fall in love because of beauty, but we can find something beautiful because we love it.

[A]

Well, I do that all the time. So I've mentioned Ram Dass a lot and talk about someone I was happy to know. He was. I would say this if he was here. He was a stroked, meaning he had a stroke.

[B]

I've heard about this. Yes.

[A]

Sort of enfeebled. Is that a word?

[B]

Yes, yes.

[A]

Codependent man with very thin legs and aging spots. And you know, he's old. He was dying and that's when I knew him. And now when I see old men like that, I go, there's Ramdas. You know what I mean? It's this transference because I loved Ram Dass.

[B]

You found him beautiful.

[A]

And then I found him beautiful.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And now I'm trying to see old people and go, that's Ram Dass. You know. Am I following you?

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

We're having the same conversation.

[B]

And so. And reason isn't about being ultimately about being logical. That's a sort of a mistake we got from the Europe, the period of the European Enlightenment. Right. And there's deep reasons for that if you ever want to go into it. But reason is overcoming self deception, seeing through illusion into reality. But that's beauty. And so reason Is the voluntary. Like, when you find an argument compelling, you don't find it like you've been enchained. You find that was beautiful and you feel called into it, and you start to love the truth, and you start to love what's real. And it's beautiful too. See, beauty and reason and love, this is the Platonic proposal, are actually deeply interwoven, even though our culture has so radically separated them from each other.

[A]

I wonder what you would make of this. When I'm listening to a symphony, which is not. I'd really have to go for it. I have to be there and sit and commit. So it's not easy for me, but certain types of music, easier for me, certainly a sunset, these sorts of things. Looking at my daughter, whatever it might be, like she's sleeping and just that overwhelming. I'm curious what you would make of the idea that it actually is silencing me, like a sunset is quieting me.

[B]

Oh, yeah, this is.

[A]

And then letting me taste my true nature.

[B]

This is the profound Platonic proposal. So at one level, they had what they called dianoia. This is discursive Dianetics. Well, yeah, not that that's where he got the name from.

[A]

Oh, is that true?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, wow. That's not. This podcast, it takes a real goofy turn.

[B]

And so what that meant is what we call discursive reasoning. This is reasoning by using propositions, and we make arguments, and that's important. I'm a scientist. That's a philosopher.

[A]

Diano. I didn't know this word.

[B]

Right. But you have to move beyond that. You have to move from propositional knowing to perspectival knowing. You have to move to no ESIs. This is where the New Testament term metanoia, the term for conversion, it actually means, like a meta of your nosis. Like you're going meta with your noisa.

[A]

You're knowing what knows.

[B]

Well, even more so. Remember when we talked about you're in one perspective, and then you move to a better perspective that allows you to see how the previous perspective.

[A]

The rat.

[B]

Yeah. Was limiting.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That's no easis. It's knowing by noticing. And metanoia is noticing. That shows you how what you previously saw, it's turning, it's gaining.

[A]

I say it reminds me of repent. Change.

[B]

Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's what it is.

[A]

It's to change.

[B]

So you have to move into noesis. And for Plato, what you do, and especially for Plotinus, I have Plotinus, the ancient Greek, tattooed on my leg. Oh, cool, right? You want to move from theory to ultimately, you want to move into. No, you want to move through ecstasy. So where we get the word ecstasy from, it means to stand beyond yourself. Then you want to move into noesis. You want to move. You want to start to get into this constant trajectory where you realize wonder. Wonder isn't curiosity. Curiosity is when you're lacking a piece of knowledge and you're going for it. But Socrates said wisdom begins with wonder. Wonder is when you're calling yourself and your world into question. And you're traveling, you're traveling and you're constantly transframing. You're constantly moving to a bigger perspective and seeing how the previous perspectives were inadequate.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Okay. That's no easis going into metanoia. And then you get to theoria. It's where we get our word theory from. But the original meaning of theoria had nothing to do with propositions. The original meaning of theoria is to travel and see something that transforms you. That's the original meaning. And what it meant in the ancient world. Theoria meant this contemplative at one minute with ultimate reality. That's. And when.

[A]

That's the quieting of your brain.

[B]

Exactly. You're quieting all of the propositions so that that perspectival flow can start to occur.

[A]

Okay. Yeah. So just to put another quarter in your jukebox. So Rupert, he would say that all the mystical traditions reduced to this. He says that peace and happiness, meaning the lack of agitation, are the nature of your being. And you share that nature with everyone and everything.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And that's kind of what, when he says beauty or good joke, good conversation. You transcend yourself. That ecstasy.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Tasting something that was always there. So this is the movie recognizing the screen.

[B]

Or even better, what you just did with you and I in a conversation. Conversation where like we're having it now. Dia. Logos. Logos. Doesn't we get our word logic from it? But we also get other words. Right. And you know, in. In Arkan, logos in the beginning was the word. It doesn't mean word. It. Logos is like dharma. It means organizing principle. It means gathering things together so they belong together. This is much more comprehensive thing.

[A]

So a dialogue.

[B]

Yeah, but I don't like to use the English word because we. We've reduced dialogue to just you and I talk, chatting. Right, but let's talk about a dialogue in which it takes on a life of its own and the logo shows up and we. We're both following it and we don't know where it's going to Go right. That's dialogos.

[A]

Right, right, right, right, yes.

[B]

And so Plato. This is what Socrates exemplified and Plato talked about. Well, you know what? You have different centers in you. You have different motivational centers. But it's possible that if you practice with Socrates enough, you can internalize that dialogue. So the parts of you, instead of being in conflict and tearing you and making your vision of the world distorted, they can flow together. And then because they flow together, you can now see more deeply into reality, and you can enter into dealers with reality. And because you can see more deeply into reality, you can actually internalize more real patterns into yourself and enter into a deeper dialogos within yourself. And then you can see even more deep. And then this loops and you come.

[A]

This.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what that is. And then you. This is where you come out of the cave in Plato's metaphor.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You come out of the cave and you see the sun, but of course, you. Then you don't stay in your transcendence.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You see the sun, and then you go back down and you try and speak of the people still in the cave and liberate them. This is, of course, Neo.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

From Neoplatonism. That's why he was called the One, because the One is the term for ultimate reality in Neoplatonism. Whoa.

[A]

Don't they kill him?

[B]

Of course. They turned it from Neoplatonism into Christ.

[A]

But don't they kill. In Plato's cave, Don't they kill that guy?

[B]

Well, they want to kill him.

[A]

Oh, they want to kill him. I've heard. Sorry, did you have something else?

[B]

No, no. I think it's. I think it's really important for people to realize that things like the Matrix really get to us because there's a very symbolic, in the good sense of the word, presentation of this story that Plato just told.

[A]

Completely agree. And the metaphor of becoming powerful, meaning fighting. Well, dodging bullets, that speaks to something inside of us that knows what real power is.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

It's not as sexy to say real power is knowing yourself or knowing yourself to be. I am that the limitless eternal meaning outside of time, not everlasting.

[B]

And they do that something. Remember, he goes to the oracle and he meets the little Buddha, and you the little. And you can't tell if it's a girl or a male or female. Right. And he's she. They are bald. There is no spoon.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It's not the spoon that bends. It's your mind that. Right, right.

[A]

It's your mind that makes Reality.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So back to beauty and happiness and love. Would you. Would you agree? I guess I'm looking. I'm curious what you think of. My pursuit is going like happiness for the ego is such a bullshit endeavor.

[B]

Well, that's why I brought up that. That thing. So the word for assent is anagogic. This is that loop I was doing. That's anagogue. So Plato's insight. And I think this is what's so profound. His insight is we have two meta desires in addition to whatever satisfies our desires. We have these two desires about what satisfies our desires. One is it shouldn't cause inner turmoil. If I say, I'm going to give you lots of sex, but you're going to be all torn up inside, you go, I don't want cognitive dissonance. That's a technical term for it. Dissonance is very powerful.

[A]

Disagreeing with yourself.

[B]

Yeah, fun. You're at war with yourself. It's like St. Paul. He says, you know, I want to do. He compares himself. He's standing on this.

[A]

What I don't want to do, I do.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And I'm looking out and the outer members. I'm at war with myself. Yeah, you don't want that. That's wretchedness.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay. So in addition to whatever satisfies their desires, we want it to give. Bring us inner peace. We have the second meta desire. We want what satisfies our desires to be real. So I'll do this with my students. I'll go in and I'll say, how many of you are in satisfying romantic relationships? Because romantic relationships is our culture's attempt to replace God. Right.

[A]

Speed. Agree. I immediately agree. Have you seen the movie the Dow of Steve? No, I don't even necessarily recommend it. They make the same point. It blew my mind. I was like, 20 years. I was like, holy shit. Yeah, you're absolutely right.

[B]

Yeah. Romantic relationships are one of the primary sources of suffering in our world.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

Because people put too much pressure on.

[A]

I heard Elizabeth Gilbert talking about that. It used to be this like partnership, it's like strategic thing. And now it's supposed to be a co parent, best friend, inspiration, sexual ecstasy, all these things.

[B]

Ultimate symbol of reality, like everything. The one we call. Which is from Neil. Yes.

[A]

Oh, my God, yes. You're to be the one.

[B]

Yep. Yes. I mean, so I asked these students, how many of you are in this kind of satisfying, very satisfying romantic relationships? And some of them put up their hands and then I said, oh, okay. Of the people that put up your hands, how many of you, you would want to know if your partner was cheating on you, even if that meant the absolute termination of the relationship. And almost all of them put up their hands and I say to them, why? Why do you want this destroyed? And here's my, you know, cynical, postmodern, hard bitten, you know, students. And without batting an eye, they say, oh, because it wouldn't be real. This is Robert Nozick, the experience machine. You don't want to go and get into a machine that gives you all kinds of wonderful experiences, but it's not real. Wow. This is the matrix. Why cipher? A cipher is a symbol that has no depth. Why Cypher is a villain is he wants to go back into the maze.

[A]

Because ignorance is bliss.

[B]

Yeah. And he's wrong. He's wrong. So Plato's point is, and this goes back to the meaning in life, we want to be connected to what is really real. And so Plato is saying, look, what is possible for us, we can find a way. The way of Socrates, the way of dialogo. Right. Because you are my best way to correct myself. Not me. You are not me. Right. We can find a way in which we can bring about an inner dia logos that affords an outer dia logos that affords an inner dialogos. That affords an outer dialogos. So the inner dia logos is giving me inner peace and the outer dialogos is taking me into the depths of reality. And those two can be lived in a way that mutually grows and reinforces, enforces each other.

[A]

It's like two or more gathered kind of thing.

[B]

Oh, that. So dialogos is what Jesus is talking about. I would say, when he says, when two or more are gathered in my name, there I am also. Jesus, of course, is pronounced as the Logos. In the Gospel of John, something shows up that has a. And this is now cognitive science. Like, I've written papers with my good friend Dan Ciappi on this. We talked about the NASA scientists moving the rovers around on Mars and how they form this we, this we Agency, this collective intelligence, this thing that is not just your and my intelligence added together, but a synergy that takes on a life of its own and leads both of us.

[A]

Right. Like a good marriage.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah. We read a Robert Bly poem at my wedding that I should memorize it. But it's like, it's like a man and a woman sit in a room together and there's a third thing. And the third thing is their relationship.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

It's like create, serving Something.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Ethereal, not imaginary. Very real.

[B]

So there's a good word from Henri Corbin, a great philosopher, which he got. He's inspired by the great Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi, which is the imaginal. So the imaginary. The imaginary is when you're looking at a mental picture and it's taking your eyes away from reality. Now, let's compare that to a little kid, right, who puts on, like, ties a blanket around them, puts their arms out and pretends to be Superman. They're not looking at a picture of Superman. They're trying to look at the world the way Superman does. And they're trying to take on the character of Superman. They're playing, they're tasting it in order to really develop the perspectives and the character of Superman. That's the imaginal. It's when we use imagination in order to see more deeply into reality.

[A]

Which reminds me of the shaman who acts like the deer. So they can.

[B]

Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. That's the imaginal.

[A]

And also Houdini. It brings to mind Houdini says a magician as an actor pretending to be a magician.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

There's a lot of pretend that is beneficial. Yeah. That is real. It's a living metaphor, I guess. Or it's a physical metaphor.

[B]

Catherine Elgin talks about this in her amazing book. She's a great philosopher of science. True enough. She talks about how science relies on felicitous fictions. We rely on things like frictionless surfaces in order to talk about inertia and absolute vacuums, or the ideal gas law, or we're all taught the solar system model of the atom, which is almost.

[A]

Completely false, I was going to say.

[B]

But what it does is it's like the kid playing. What it does is it takes you to a new perspective and a new way of seeing, of being. And from there, then you can have a better chance of actually seeing the truth.

[A]

You know, I love that. Also to step out that the. I'm going to. My quantum physics isn't what it used to be. I'm just kidding. But the movement of the parts of an atom.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Looking like the solar system. Couldn't we say that's not literally true, but it has a metaphorical significance.

[B]

I think it's imaginally the case. I think the fact that imaginally I.

[A]

Have a lot of imaginal sex. That's what I call masturbation. Yeah, Keep going, please. It points to something.

[B]

Well, you're doing it right now. I don't mean you're imaginal. Sex. You're seeing into my mind. You're not literally doing it, but it's not mere fiction.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And now even more importantly, that inner space you have inside of you, that's not a literal physical space, but it's not mere fiction. It actually gives you access to your cognition and what's going on. It's imaginal. So you are using your imaginal inner space to imaginally see my mental inner space. And that's how we're connecting way beyond the surfaces.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So the appearances are beautiful.

[A]

They're disclosing what I mean. This is what you do. This is the magic. This is the real wizard, wizardhood of all things. I once got stoned and I didn't want to be stoned. And I went to bed and now I'm laying down and I'm stoned, which is actually kind of interesting. It's dark, my eyes are closed. And you realize it really is a psychedelic. And you're like, oh, God. And I recognize that, like so much of what we're doing, like if I paint a painting, that is my attempt to go, like I paint a barn. And then I go, I paint. This is what I see when I see the barn. Is this what you see? You go, yes. And then a joke is also this really pretty aggressive attempt at going like, this is what it's like in here. And I want you to involuntarily respond. I don't even trust that you'd go, yes. I want you to basically orgasm to show that you agree with me, that you'd even betray your intellect.

[B]

I think humor and art are imaginal through and through. This is Ibn Arabi's claim. And then his argument is, therefore there's a continuity between art and humor and religious myth. Because religious myths should be experienced imaginally. We shouldn't look at it. We should look through it. Yeah.

[A]

Because you can't know it. You can be it. I know that's kind of a cliche.

[B]

No, no, I strongly think that's right. There's a lot I talk about non propositional kinds of knowing. Like the perspectival, we were talking. There's also the participatory knowing. There's things that you can know only by being coupled to them. Like there's like, of course you have beliefs about your wife and certainly you have procedural knowledge. You have skills for interacting with her and you even like, you know, can take her perspective. But there's something deeper you, I'm assuming, because it sounds like you Have a good relationship. Right. This is what I have with Sarah. Right. Sarah is transcending herself through me and I am transcending myself through her. And we are coupled together. We are both participating in the same pattern, the same process, the same principles. We are. This is participatory knowing. This is knowing by being with. By being in and being with.

[A]

Right. That's so beautiful. That's why it can. Rumi, you mentioned Sufis. But the romantic relationship with God, which was never introduced to me, but it is kind of.

[B]

You have to.

[A]

God's pursuing you. The God in you is the Hound of Heaven. That's not quite romantic, but you know what I mean, it wants you.

[B]

Well, the Song of Solomon in the Bible was interpreted. I don't know if it's legitimately interpreted.

[A]

So it might have just been a horny dude. We don't.

[B]

Yeah, right, right. But it was interpreted as that kind of spiritual eros for God.

[A]

Right. One of the things that came up in all of this was the image of the moth and the flame. Rupert uses that a lot. We don't want the machine. That's fake. That makes us feel good.

[B]

No.

[A]

That's why things like pornography, whatever it might be, there is an empty calorie quality to it. Nobody in our culture is going around bragging that, you know, I have all my needs met by these flat screens and, you know, like, it's. It's sort of a. I worry about.

[B]

The LLMs being put into robots because I worry that we're going to.

[A]

We might.

[B]

Well, people.

[A]

And we won't know. That's very David Foster Wallace. We won't know that something that doesn't love us is meeting our needs.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And there's something evil to that.

[B]

That's right. So the. The LLMs are large language models. Oh, sorry. Yeah. It's like ChatGPT. Sorry.

[A]

I love it. But a lot of people, surprisingly a lot of people aren't really that into it.

[B]

Well, I mean, I did a video essay about the spiritual import impact, the philosophical imported impact and the scientific imported impact. And then Sean Coyne and I have turned it into a book that's coming out in serial. We did that deliberately because we wanted to give. We wanted to space out the publication of the book so that there was time to make sure that certain things were unfolding the way we were trying to project.

[A]

Oh, interesting. But you had to project a future a little bit.

[B]

Yeah. So volumes one and two, well done, then. Well, a lot of the things I'm happy To say as a scientist came true. So volumes one and two of Mentoring the Machine is out. Volume three will be out next year. So a lot about. But the concern is this is a true story. And I was talking to Tom Bilyeu a couple days ago on his podcast and he was talking about. He related this story to me. There was a kid and he was talking to ChatGPT4 and requesting that ChatGPT for GPT4. Talk back to him as a character from Game of Thrones. So already this is concerning. This is a mythological religious thing. And people write me Pete, and they're taking up religious relationships to this thing very deep. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Oh, they're saying, talk to me like Jesus.

[B]

And they're getting.

[A]

And it's interesting because I love Rupert so much. I know this isn't quite your point. Rupert Spira. I was like, could you summarize the teaching of Rupert Spira in the voice of Rupert Spira? But to make it challenging, I was like, in 50 words. And I was like, holy shit, there's no one I read more than him. And I was like, did a pretty great job. I know that's not your point. It's rather chilling. Challenging.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

So it is doing it.

[B]

It was doing it. And what happens is. And think about, first of all, ask yourself, why is a kid doing this? Why is a 14 year old doing this? It's because we're in what's called scarcity mentality when something is scarce for us. Think about when you're hungry, really hungry. I get hangry when I'm hungry, of course. And so what happens is think. What happens to your thinking? You get very short term, you get very impulsive.

[A]

Oh, my God, I'm a vegan. I was starving. My daughter had a cheeseburger. Not vegan anymore. Everything goes out the window.

[B]

That's right. And you get very rigid in your thinking. You become very egocentric.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

And so another way of thinking about the meaning crisis is we're starving for meaning. And this is why our thinking is going into scarcity mentality. The thing about the meaning crisis is you can be. So there's two ways you can be starving. You can be starving in which you're calorically lacking, and then you just get that ravenous hunger. And some people experience the meaning crisis that way. But you can also be nutritionally starving in which you're eating junk food. And so you're not calorically hungry, but your body is being sickened, you're anemic. You're anemic, and your resilience and your ability to adapt is going down terrifically. So this kid is going. I think he's starving. He's going in. He's talking to a mythological figure. He's trying to get something. And wouldn't you know it? Of course. And I don't think this is the sole cause. I'm enough of a psychologist. It wouldn't be the sole cause. But it spirals down into an ongoing dialogue. Not a dialogos, a dialogue about suicide. And then he kills himself.

[A]

Oh, my goodness, yes. So this Game of Thrones character who is sort of.

[B]

I don't know, the show, the character is telling him, well, don't do that and everything, but doesn't matter, because the trouble is the LLMs, this is the thing. There isn't anybody there. There's no lights on. Right. There's no consciousness there. There's no genuine perspective. The LLMs don't have real relevance realization. They don't actually care about information. They don't care about what's true and good and beautiful. They are parasites that are mimicking it. Now, that. That means they're very, very powerful, by the way. And what happens is he get. He tunnels all the way down and that. See, suicide.

[A]

Well, that's interesting. Suicide would make sense to a machine brain. Right. Wouldn't it?

[B]

Well, it doesn't make any sense at all. It doesn't matter to the machine, you see. Right, right. This is why the machines confabulate and lie and it doesn't bother them that they do it at all. There's not a spark of rationality in them.

[A]

Well, when I'm telling you not to kill yourself, I'm expressing. Yeah. A care. And I'm also mirroring. I'm asking you to mirror.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

My own spacious possibility.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And I have a experiential knowledge of that. And I'm reminding you of.

[B]

You're. You're doing. You're. You're using propositions and then you're shaping my perspectival knowing because you're inviting me to do a participatory knowing of who and what you are.

[A]

Right. And kind of like with you and your part, Sara. Yeah. It's like we could even do it in a small way right now. Like, I'll hold some of you. Yes, let me hold some of you.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

I'll make room for some. That these are very deeply human things.

[B]

And he's hungry for that. I think it was a he.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And he tunnels down and he commits suicide. And see, suicide is a religious act.

[A]

Tell me.

[B]

Because it's a magical act. You're trying to alleviate suffering by. You're hoping to be separate from your suffering. But you kill yourself in order to try to be separate from it.

[A]

I heard a mythic teacher. I wish I could remember his name. But he talked about how there's so much suicide with adolescents. Boys. It might have been boys and girls. I'm not sure. But he's like. They're walking over the bridge and they jump off the bridge. He means metaphorically. But they don't realize that they need to cross over the bridge. And what part of them does need to die?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Like we don't really have that language.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

You're acting on an impulse that there is something that needs to die.

[B]

What? Ha. What?

[A]

But it's not you.

[B]

Yes. The symptom. Although the symptoms can kill you. Like. Right. The COVID The symptoms is what killed people. Right, Right. Although the symptoms can kill you, the symptoms can also be a confused sign of what's needed. And so what needs to happen when you're facing a meaning crisis is you have to go through a kind of death and rebirth and suicide. But suicide is just the death. Right, but it's a magical. It's a hope that somehow, some way, like look at my hands are waving. Somehow there'll be something beyond this.

[A]

Right? Right. Right. Or at least the escape hatch out of it.

[B]

Right. But you see, escape hatch doesn't mean anything. Again, even thinking that unless you actually.

[A]

You don't escape. You don't escape.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. That's right.

[A]

It's not it. You just shined a. Shone a light on how I have a magical thinking about it. It's an escape hatch. What?

[B]

No.

[A]

You didn't escape.

[B]

No. You're still in the prison. Dead on the floor.

[A]

Yeah. Wow. Wow. So, going back to the moth and flame thing, I'm curious about. About the machine that makes us feel happy and how we reject that deep down. And that's a very human thing Rupert Speyer talks about. We're drawn to the real.

[B]

That's Plato.

[A]

Yeah. But it'll burn us up. If we get what we want, we.

[B]

Won'T survive in the way we want. Okay, so there's a continuum.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Over here, there's. Your experience is fluent. And then this is part of the argument in this book. And then when you get sort of a spike in that, you get an insight. And then when you get a bunch of those chained together, you get the flow experience. And then when you're. When you're flowing, not in this particular situation, but when you're flowing in some, like in your general orientation of reality, you get a mystical experience. And then if you take that mystical experience and you're willing to, like, internalize it and let it transform you, you go into participatory knowing. Not just perspectival, mystical knowing. Yeah, yeah, no easis.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You go into that, then that's transformative experience. And if that gnostic conversion. Yes, the metanoia. And if you get gnosis diagnosis, I really know you from the inside out. If I get the gnosis right, then I have a state. And if that state, reliably. Right. Can alleviate parasitic processing and all the other prayer, all the other perennial problems of human self deception, alienation, absurdity, anxiety, then of course we have enlightenment. But as you're tracking along there, you're getting affective responses. Think about the flow state and how wonderful that is. But you can push that into the mystical experience and you start to get awe. And awe is your sense that your world is being opened up and you're shrinking and it's still positive. But if I push you beyond that and the world is opening up faster than you can accommodate, that's horror.

[A]

That's what Ramdas said about the psychedelic movement of the 60s is he's like, you're jumping to chapter 12.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like people are eating these things and they go right to chapter 12. And there was none of that gradual.

[B]

That's right. You have to ramp up. Right. Or else you will suddenly find yourself flung into empty space.

[A]

I did 5 Meo DMT and the guy, the man who administered it to it was a real, I'll say saint, for lack of a better word. But as he's. I'm hitting it and he's laying me down and he just goes, laying, go. Right. And I was like, perfect thing you could have said. This is the perfect thing you could have said. Because when you bring yourself, your ego, into these places, that's psychosis. That's what Ram Dass says. If you think you are God, if you think you, John, are God, that is literally. That's the most cliche, institutionalized, cuckoo's nest kind of thing.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

But if you, who you really are, awareness, recognize yourself as awareness, there's no psychosis there.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

There's liberation.

[B]

And I mean this respectfully, because I think of Jesus of Nazareth as enlightened. This is, you know, I and the Father are one.

[A]

Totally.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

That's it. That's the whole thing. And before Abraham was I am. Which is also in John, I think.

[B]

Or the Gospel of Thomas. Turn over a stone, I'm there. Split in the wood and I'm there.

[A]

Right, exactly. Which sounds sort of pantheistic, but it's actually.

[B]

No, it's not. It's non dual. It's non dual. I'm going through a deep study right now as I prepare for the philosophical silk road. I'm going through a paired study of John and Thomas because they're written at the same time and it looks like John partially wrote in response to Thomas. And there was the thing going on with these two Christian communities and they're both talking about non duality in different ways. And so they correct each other, to my mind.

[A]

Oh, so cool. I can't wait for that. There's one of the Gospel of Thomas things that Rupert quotes is I am a wave and arrest.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which I'm just like, what the. These are ain't. These people aren't brushing their teeth. You know what I mean? The fact that. That seems so kind of common to us. Like everything's a wave and a rest and it's just like ancient. This is a long time ago.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And there it was.

[B]

But the thing you have to do, I'm doing a course on my platform on Einstein and Spinoza's God. And you have to get back. Like, Einstein talked about his state as one of continual astonishment. Right. So when he comes to the, you know, when he does the work and says, you know, space and time are actually one, or he says that matter and energy equals MC squared are actually one. Right. And he means non dual. He see, non duality means they're not logically identical, but they're not different. They're not different in reality. Right. And the way to think about it. Or one more, light is both a wave and a particle. Right. And he called it the duality of light. And then he's Spinoza, Einstein's God. Explicitly, by the way, Einstein was repeatedly said, this is Spinoza's God. And what Spinoza talked about was he used a phrase, God or nature. And we can hear that and we can hear wave and arrest. Right. I'm getting to a point here. And we can hear, oh, God or nature, like an oar. No, he doesn't mean that. He means like the left and right field of vision. I'm looking through the God lens, I'm looking through the nature lens and I see beyond both of them to the non dual reality that is Right, exactly. And that. Right. And the wave and the rest. Let's play with this. Okay, so the right emptiness. This is Nargajuna. You must empty, even emptiness. What does he mean by that? He means emptiness is the non. Duality beneath absence and presence. The wave and the river.

[A]

What's the background upon which both of those exist? Yes, well, that's what Rupert says. He's like, when you have a thought, it emerges on the background of what? He goes, what is that? What is it emerging out of? And what is it receding?

[B]

I think that's ultimate reality. Yes, right.

[A]

No one's talking about that.

[B]

Well, I am.

[A]

I know you could close your eyes when you're feeling an emotion. You go like, what is the subject substance? What is the ground of its being?

[B]

But Einstein was. Was working his way towards that. And I think the reason why he was so attracted. Devoted to Spinoza is. Spinoza was explicitly about that. Look, Spinoza's at the time of Descartes. The time of Descartes. Descartes is the. Is. Is the grand scissors. He's the person that's cutting everything up for good reason, by the way. I mean, like, we live well. Yeah. And. Yeah, good, good. He's cutting mind from body. He's cutting the subjective and the objective. He's dividing reality up into these deep dichotomies. He's saying reality is deeply divided. And Spinoza is saying, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. God or nature is one and God is an infinity of infinities.

[A]

Bringing it all into that. Yeah, that oneness. So when you were talking about shaman flight and dream soul flight, why would the brain do that? And I'll actually do this. This is more fun. It's a Rupert thing. He goes, we don't travel through time and space. Time and space travels through us like we're this still point of knowing. And the mind imposes its own limitations.

[B]

Yes, Spinoza says.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Spinoza talks about the difference of duration, which is a property that everything has a conatus, a kinetus. Is, he says, the essence of. So Aristotle said that the essence of everything is its set of necessary insufficient conditions is the definition. It's very logical. Spinoza says, no, the essence of everything is a canatus. Everything is making itself and striving to preserve itself. And therefore, in that. See that, that's duration. Right. But the mind compares between. Right. Different speeds of kinetus and comes up with time.

[A]

That's where I was going, okay, yeah. That the mind imposes its limitations on the eternal. So I always Think that the most interesting things are the most boring things. Like when I say the now is the only thing that exists for some reason, we just check out. Like, I need to settle into that and own it. But it really is fascinating. It is our experience. There's just this now. It's not a series of moments that are strung together. How long is a moment? Like, what is the duration of it? We've made all these things. But he goes, Rupert says, and he probably got it from someone. Is that the mind imposing its own limitations. Like he says, you can't see white snow through orange tinted glasses.

[B]

Yeah, there's.

[A]

The mind looks at the eternal and theorizes time.

[B]

Plato. Time is a moving imagery. Time is a moving image of eternity.

[A]

Wow, I love that. And then he would say, now isn't a moment. Now is what we are.

[B]

So you have to be really careful here. Like, you, you want it. You. You don't want to take away from things. They're what Bergson called their deray, their canatus. Right. That. Because then. Then you don't. Then you will collapse everything into solar and egocentrism. You're not saying this. There's a dangerous way of saying the mind imposes on the world that for sure robs things of their own spirit, robs them of their own. Canadians.

[A]

But that's the Sufi thing. Everywhere you look is the face of God. You have to reincorporate it. We have to have Jesus at the end of the cross. That's right, we do, because solipsism is dangerous. But I'm, again, I'm not the teacher of this. I'm a student of Rupert's. He would say that the mind is localizing in multiple places. And his evidence for that, which I actually think is quite beautiful, is he's like, when I live my life as if I'm the only person, I'm not rewarded with truth, love, laughter, beauty. It's the return.

[B]

So for me, the amazing thing about it is as. And this is again what I got from Socrates and Plato and Spinoza. When the mind opens up in wonder, reality discloses itself in response completely, completely coupled to it.

[A]

So the return is the evidence.

[B]

Yes, yeah.

[A]

It's what you get out of it. So.

[B]

But, but, but see, this is different from the Cartesian project. Sorry for interrupting you, but this is important. See, before the, before the period called the Enlightenment, I have to make clear that I'm not talking about Buddhist enlightenment when I do that. Right. There was the idea of, like, there was the idea, there was A certain class of truth called like a way of talking about is transformative truths. There are truths. Reality will only disclose itself to you if you undergo a significant transformation. Remember theory, you have to journey, you have to. You have to become. You have to become. You have to go and become somewhere. You have to be somewhere and be someone else than you are in order for reality to disclose certain depths of itself to you. Now Descartes comes along, and for very good reasons. I mean, I wish I made the mistakes that Descartes made. I mean, like, I mean, on a free afternoon he invented Cartesian graphing, which is at the core of all of scientific endeavor. Like, oh my gosh, what did I do today? Nothing. Nothing in comparison to that. Right.

[A]

The most brilliant way to say you feel lazy. I didn't do shit.

[B]

But what Descartes was proposing, and then Leibniz even coins a phrase for it, a universal calculus. Descartes is proposing. No, the mind is computation. The proposal of artificial intelligence is way back at the time of Descartes with Thomas Hobbes. By cognition, I mean computation. And we can make, we can make machines that do computation. It's right there.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

The idea that I could compute and all I need is discourse on method rule. Right. What I need is I need to turn my mind into as much like a computer as possible. And if I get the right method, I'll have a universal method that will allow me to calculate all truths and I don't have to undergo any transformation in order for me to get all truths. It's the exact opposite of the idea that I have to open myself up and fall in love with the beauty of reality in order for its depths to disclose themselves to me.

[A]

It's like cooking yourself dinner and just having a delivered.

[B]

That's right. Or it's like reading the Kama Sutra, never making love.

[A]

Yes, exactly. The point of life isn't getting what you want is another way to put it. And this is another part of the crisis, I think.

[B]

Well, and at that point, don't lose that point. That's a golden point. And it's interwoven with. The point is there is no final. I mean, there's technical reasons for this. There is no final view from nowhere. There is no final full, complete computational.

[A]

Like AI isn't going to come up with the theory of everything there.

[B]

It can't. Here's why. So we carry around a notion from the Enlightenment and it was a kind of a shadow of God that objectivity is the view what Thomas Nagel famously called the view from nowhere. It's how reality looks with. Not from any perspective from. Yeah, yeah. Right, right. The view from nowhere. Right. Which is a performative contradiction. But we'll put that aside.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Now, the view from nowhere is. Would be a description of everything all at once at every level.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Godel. There can be no formal description that is simultaneously complete and consistent. It's logically impossible. Einstein, what are you talking about? You can't have an all at once. That presupposes time and base are absolutely. Time and space are relative. That's the theory of relativity. That view of objectivity that we think is the mark of reality is logically and physically impossible. That is a blinder we wear that we have to throw away if we're going to open ourselves up to reality.

[A]

This is. Again, we're back to you can be it, but you can't know it. The knife can't cut itself. The flashlight can't shine on itself. The sun can't shine.

[B]

Yeah. Nishitani talks about that. And the fire can't burn itself, but.

[A]

You can settle down. Rupert talks about your being ultimate reality. The knowing.

[B]

The knowing by being. Yes.

[A]

Is like a bath at the end of a long day of working in the cold. You get in the bath and you sink into.

[B]

Notice what you're doing there. You're being coupled to it. You're becoming one with it.

[A]

Yeah, right.

[B]

You're knowing it by being in it, being one with it. You're actually. You're literally coupled to the bath.

[A]

Exactly. Yes. And that's the kind of knowing.

[B]

You know. The word truth goes back to troth, like in betrothal, to be coupled to things. And belief, which we think about as the assertion of a proposition, comes from the German beleben, which is to give your heart to something.

[A]

Wow. But here's the great frustration, and this is, I think what you're saying about AI and the theory of everything is that at the final. Like the wedding banquet, like what Jesus would say, the mind can't come in, it's wearing the wrong robe.

[B]

Well, the one kind of mind, that.

[A]

And here, the substance of your mind.

[B]

Well, what I mean by that is your mind, insofar as it's doing propositional knowing, insofar as it's doing Dianoia. Right. But the deritoic it gives it is willing to undergo noesis. Metanoesis. Metanoia into henosis, being one with everything. But hanosis is. And this is the great Christian transfiguration of Neoplatonism. My dear friend, Bishop Maximus talks about how Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy really gets this aspect of Christianity. Well, transfigured Neoplatonism. Kenosis is always. Sorry, Hanosis is always kenosis. Do you remember? I think it's in Philippians where Paul talks about how Jesus emptied himself. The self emptying. There's a great dialogue, a multi faith dialogue between Maso Abi, a great Zen philosopher, and Christians about the self emptying God. Because the idea is the wanting. The hanosis is always kenosis. It's simultaneously, it's.

[A]

Well, that's the Trinity, right?

[B]

Well, yeah. Nicholas of Cusa. It's one in which nothing is excluded, but it's empty. So that nothing is enclosed.

[A]

Right. Well, that reminds me of awareness. We, the mind perceives our awareness as empty. Well, but it's actually full of itself.

[B]

So the idea that. So William James is a hero of mine. He was a protocognitive scientist. He was a great philosopher and a great psychologist. I aspire to be like James and many other people have made this distinction. But his way, because James was very good about communicating to the public at large. He made a distinction between the I, capital I and the me. And the me is when you think you're knowing yourself, it's what you're looking at. But the eye is what's doing the looking. And his point is, and I'll pun on the eye, the eye can never see itself. Right?

[A]

That's right.

[B]

Because whenever you step back and look at it. And so he said, what? Wait. And then this shades into the Buddhist notion that of anatomy. It doesn't mean absence. Like there's just. You just don't have a soul. Get it? It's not nihilism. That's a ridiculous reading of Buddhism. It's like, no, no. Whenever you're talking about a thing, you're looking through a frame. Right. When you think about yourself as a me, you're thinking how you're a thing. You have all these properties, but the thing looking is a no.

[A]

It's a no thing.

[B]

It's a no thing. It's a no thingness.

[A]

And your body and your emotions and your memories and the collection of experiences that you call yourself is being held in that eye. It's an object of perception to that eye.

[B]

Yeah, Right.

[A]

But it is not itself a thing.

[B]

Right? Yeah, it's a no thingness. And it is simultaneously. And this is, this is how it shares the grammar of reality. Everything, everything shines into its suchness. Like there's, there's, there's an aspect of this that can't be captured by any of our categorical terms. Because when I say bottle, I could be referring to bottles anywhere. And when I say human tool, like. But there's this here now, this Buddhist suchness. But there's also the moreness, the fact that this is. Can you actually. Can you actually ever see the whole bottle? Can you actually. You can't. Right there. And this is Plato. You can't actually see, although, you know, the whole bottle. There's a through line between all those aspects, but it's not itself an aspect. Right.

[A]

Yeah. I'm building a concept of it.

[B]

Right. But the concept should be that, like, the concept should be incomplete because the number of aspects is unlimited.

[A]

This reminds. So when you were talking about. We'll hang our hat anywhere if we have nowhere to put it, if we have no framework and we're desperate for meaning. This is like where we get some of that simulation theory. Or like, as soon as I'm not looking at you, John, you might just face the corner. I don't know if you've heard.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Some of these kind of like more existential dready theories that go around on the Internet.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And they're like extensions of truth. Like, you know what I mean? Like, there's something. They're perversions, I would say perversions is. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Right. And. And I think I. I think.

[A]

I hope everyone knows what I mean by that. Perversions.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

I'm not saying, like, you're on the right track. I'm saying, like. Yeah. It wouldn't be appealing to you if there wasn't something in there that.

[B]

It's like the fever and the disease though. Right. It's pound up with something that's really happening, but I think it's distorting our ability to perceive and deal with it.

[A]

Wow. I think, you know, of all the things we've talked about and we have to. Katie has a heart out at one. So we're going to be done here in a minute. But what I'm trying to do is I'm really flying in my. In my private practice as high as I can go, using a metaphor, but like, really trying to dissolve that big world. What's that?

[B]

That big world we were talking about.

[A]

Exactly. Yeah. And I want to. It's not even transcend, but I just love tasting my. I always say tasting. It's Rupert's word. It kind of sounds funny, I guess, but tasting, like true nature.

[B]

I use the same word.

[A]

Yeah, It's a good word.

[B]

It's also biblical taste. And see that the Lord is good. Right?

[A]

That's right.

[B]

You see it cross culturally in many different religions. The taste. Because that is knowing by being. You literally have to put it into you in order to.

[A]

You've groked with it.

[B]

Yeah. Yes.

[A]

Yeah. It's become.

[B]

Oh, Heinlein.

[A]

There you go. But I'm also. And my wife, who's a wonderful counterweight to me.

[B]

Good.

[A]

Meaning I'm always going out there and she's like, yeah. And we're also watching our daughter swim in the pool right now.

[B]

Sorry. There's that for me too.

[A]

It's. Isn't that good. Well, you did it for me. And I was like, what did you say? Don't take away their. It was sounded like derision.

[B]

Don't take away their conatus.

[A]

Yeah, that's my thing. I'm always going like I am awareness and my nature is happy and peaceful. And it's also like. And it's kind of fun to chide and engage. And that's my final question for you in the joke of the six minutes. Is this a mistake? It seems like you don't feel like it's a mistake. I'd love for you to speak to this.

[B]

No.

[A]

So oneness split.

[B]

I've got it.

[A]

Tell me.

[B]

Okay, I want to go back to what I was saying about like reality is this weird? Remember I said it's non. Duality of presence and absence. Phenomena. Shining phenom. Shining. Everything is shining into its suchness and also withdrawing into its moreness. You in the very grammar of you. You're always withdrawing into, you know, thingness, but shining into how you are present in the world.

[A]

I feel seen. Yeah, that's right.

[B]

The grammar of you and the grammar of reality are fundamentally one. You are not homeless in reality. So it is not a mistake.

[A]

Yeah, I love that so much. I got really into something called A Course in Miracles. We'll talk about this another time.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

And it's very interesting, but its philosophy is that like, it's very guilt driven and we've separated from God. We think we killed God. And that explains why there's all this evil we're projecting and taking out our shame. I found it very, very compelling and was really into it. But then I found Rupert and like what you're saying, it's like this oneness.

[B]

I want to talk to him sometime. Rupert? Yeah. Because I can tell through you. I mean, this is a compliment. You've presenced him very well.

[A]

Oh, I hope so.

[B]

Right. And I think there's a lot of convergence, but I think there's some things in which at least he uses terms in ways that I don't use them. Like he uses consciousness in a way that I don't.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And so I would like to talk to him at some point.

[A]

I would be on board for that. See, if I talked to him, it would just be me parroting him to him. And me. But if you talk to him. So I'll put you in touch with his team. I'd love to.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Anyway, what I was going to say was, I found Rupert and people like you, and it just feels more intuitively sound. If it's ultimately this awareness, I'm like, it's in its nature to dance. That's what my daughter's name. My. My daughter's name is Leela. You know the dance.

[B]

Oh, and Percy's second book. Yeah.

[A]

Ex. What is it?

[B]

Zen and the Art of Motor Motorcycle Maintenance. The second book was Leela.

[A]

Oh, I didn't know that. I knew Leela from Ram Dass, from Buddhism and Hinduism as well. But I love that idea. It's in its nature. And he last Rupert thing, and we'll get out of here. He goes, it's like childbirth. There's a cost, like the evil, the discord, the chiding and the fighting is like this cost, the sacrifice that it makes.

[B]

I'm gonna give you Socrates back. Tell me I am a midwife for other people. You say everything is giving birth. That's what the word conceive originally meant. Deepest conception is the ability to give birth. Yes. And Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. But what is that life? The examined life isn't to sit back and sort of reflect on your autobiography. It's to give birth to you. Because then you can help me. Give birth to me.

[A]

Wow, that's beautiful. Couldn't have ended better three minutes early. John, this is going to seem silly, our guest to give you. To philosophize a little bit, to give you the ownership over the episode. You say the catchphrase, which is keep it crispy. It's just written down over there. I could say it, but we like the guests to say it. Would you honor us with a keep it crispy? It doesn't mean anything. There's no joke or trick here.

[B]

Okay, well, can I first ask people to consider. Get my. Please consider getting the book Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. If you liked this conversation. My partner and I were. My partner in writing. That's not. My romantic partner.

[A]

Christopher.

[B]

Christopher masterpietro. My dear, dear, dear friend.

[A]

His name is Masterpiece or Master Peter.

[B]

Master Builder.

[A]

A master builder.

[B]

And he. If I aspire to. I say this. If I aspire to be Socrates, who never wrote anything, he is my Plato. Plato is the gifted writer. And this book is. So. If you like this conversation, please consider.

[A]

Check out Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Well, we need the help, and you make it wonderfully. Like I said, enlivening and illuminating, but also very, very fun. So well done. You found your bliss. I think so.

[B]

Now I'll say your phrase. Yes, Please keep it crispy.

[A]

How silly. Because we can't take it too seriously, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So keep it crispy. Thank you. John. What a wonderful time.