Ep. 3 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar

Vervaeke's lecture contrasts the pre-Axial 'continuous cosmos' with the Axial Revolution's 'great disembedding,' showing how new psycho-technologies (alphabet, coinage) reshaped mythic meaning.

Key Takeaways

The Axial Revolution produced a 'great disembedding' from the continuous cosmos, reframing the self's relation to the world.
Psycho-technologies like alphabetic literacy and coinage transformed cognition by enabling second-order, self-reflective thought.
Axial mythology centers on transformation of mind and heart as the route to reducing suffering and accessing reality.
Historical Israel and Greece exemplify new ideas of open history, participation, and rational abstraction.

What the video covers

Recaps earlier episodes: shamanism, the flow experience, metaphorical cognition, and the Upper Paleolithic transition.
Describes the Neolithic Revolution, rise of civilizations, and the Bronze Age collapse as context for the Axial Revolution (c. 800-300 BCE).
Explains alphabetic literacy's origin in Canaan and its spread to Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Greeks, enhancing distributed cognition.
Argues alphabetic literacy and coinage internalized into metacognition, producing second-order thought and awareness of self-deception.
Clarifies that 'myth' here means symbolic stories about perennial patterns, not falsehoods.
Characterizes the pre-Axial 'continuous cosmos': continuity between nature, society, and gods, differing in power rather than kind.
Notes Egyptian God-king and glorious/powerful (not moral) divine attributes as examples of power-based cosmology.
Introduces the Axial worldview's two-world mythology: an everyday world beset by self-deception versus a more real world accessed through transformation.
Discusses Israel's idea of an open future (the 'I will be what I will be' reading of YHWH) and participatory history.
Explores Greek democracy, rational reflection, and mathematics as tools revealing abstract patterns, with Pythagoras as a contrast case.

Chapters

What is the 'continuous cosmos' described in this video?

The continuous cosmos is the pre-Axial worldview in which humans, nature, society, and gods form a radically connected whole, differing mainly in power rather than kind. Reality is experienced in cycles that ritual aims to tap into and harmonize with.

How does the speaker define 'myth'?

The speaker rejects the common meaning of myth as a widely believed falsehood. Instead, myth refers to symbolic stories about perennial patterns that are always present, attempting to make intuitive, implicitly learned patterns shareable.

What role do alphabetic literacy and coinage play in the Axial Revolution?

They are described as psycho-technologies that became internalized, producing second-order thought and metacognitive awareness. Users became more aware of their cognition's power, its capacity for self-deception, and its potential for self-correction.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening from the meeting crisis this is our third time together last time we were talking about more what was going on in shamanism and the Upper Paleolithic transition we talked a lot about the flow experience

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and how it integrates altered states of consciousness something like or at least on a continuum with mystical experiences and meaning making enhanced insight and intuition and how this resulted in an enhanced capacity for metaphorical cognition which greatly expands human

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cognition makes it much more creative much more capable of generating all of those fantastic connections in meaning that drove the upper paleolithic transitions explosion in culture and technology and then we moved to consider some other intervening revolutions that

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also had an impact we talked briefly about the Neolithic Revolution and the beginning of Agriculture and then the rise of civilizations we got into the Bronze Age civilization and then that led us into the revolution we're concentrating on now which is the axial

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revolution a period around between 800 BCE and 300 BCE following the Bronze Age collapse the Bronze Age collapse if you remember was one of the greatest if not the greatest collapse in civilization the world has ever seen and that

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facilitated much more experimentation in smaller scale societies and that experimentation resulted in the creation of new psycho technologies one was alphabetic literacy happening in the area of canaan and it's eventually going to be taken up very quickly by the

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Hebrews and then taken up by the Phoenicians and taken to the Greeks the Greeks as we'll see today or at least today or next time further improved it we talked about how that psycho technology alphabetic literacy makes literacy

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more effective more efficiently learned more powerful its operation greatly expands the number of people that can be literate enhances the distributed cognition and how that psycho technology gets internalized into our meta cognition and produces second-order thought we get an enhanced awareness of

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our own cognition both its power and its peril we get an enhanced awareness of its capacity for self correction and self transcendence we also get an enhanced awareness of its capacity for self-deception we talked also about the invention of

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coinage to help deal with the mobile armies of this time and how that trains you in abstract symbolic thought and more rigorous mathematical reasoning and that also gets internalized it gets exacted right into second order thinking and people start to become aware of

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themselves in a different way they start to become much more aware of the meaning-making nature of their of the cognition its capacity to generate illusion and self-deception and also its capacity to break out of illusion and self-deception and to come into a

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contact with a more real world so this leads to some fundamental changes people start to become more aware of their responsibility for the violence and the chaos and the suffering in their own lives and they start to become aware of

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how much the transformation of mind or mind and heart because in the actual age these terms are often referred to in a singular manner how much transformation in the mind and heart is the way to alleviate suffering so what starts to

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happen is the mythological framing frame framework and the way people are framing themselves and their world changes now let me explain to you how I'm using this word myth because I'm not using it the way we standardly use it this you did

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the use I'm going to talk about it's been deeply influenced by people like young people like Tillich Victor Turner just a whole bunch of different fingers so when we use the word myth to mean a falsehood that is widely

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believed okay and that's unfortunate because we've lost the term for what I want to talk about see miss aren't fault stories about the ancient past there's symbolic stories about perennial patterns that are always with us that's a very different thing so a lot of

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what's going on in myth is an attempt to take these intuitive implicitly learned patterns and put them into some form that is shareable with ourselves and with each other so in the Bronze Age world before the axial revolution people

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experience the world in what's been called by Charles Taylor like the continuous cosmos well I have a few questions about the use of the word cosmos but we'll come back to that later the idea here is human being has

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experienced themselves in radical continuity that that sense of connectedness right that you see even back in the shamanic world was very prevalent in the continuous cosmos and the continuous cosmos people feel there's a deep connection a deep continuity between the natural world and

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the cultural world and between the cultural world and the world of the gods so the difference is right are not really differences so much in kind as they are in power it's not odd that animals might talk alright or they might

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have sort of deep societies it's not odd for us for certain human individuals to think themselves divine like the greatest actual age sorry the great the greatest pre Axial Age Empire is Egypt and the Pharaoh is a God king he's

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something like a God why for up for us we can only understand that at most metaphorically here's what you have to try and understand it's not a metaphor for the ancient Egyptians why because the difference is between right human

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beings and the gods our differences in power this is a cosmos that is experience where reality is experienced primarily in power in terms of power the gods are just more powerful than us more glorious than us you can even see this in the Old

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Testament right where if you got if you ask people you can ask people what you know what term is most often used of God and people will say you know righteous or holy well those are used quite often

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but the term that's most used is glorious shining with power right which it's not a moral term at all think of the Greek gods they're not moral exemplars at all they're just extremely glorious and extremely powerful the Egyptian King the Pharaoh is extremely

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glorious and extremely powerful so of course he's godlike or potentially even a god so there's a continuous cosmos and it's continuous in another way right it moves like this it moves in great cycles just like the seasons just

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like day and night time moves in large cycles that repeat through eternity in fact what you're often trying to do with your ritual behavior is you're trying to tap into this continuity you're trying to get back to the original power of

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creation so you often enact the metaphorical story the myth of how the universe is created in order to try and tap into that creative power there's a there's a there's a constant nostalgia for getting back right and your attitude

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towards the world is you want to fit in to these cycles you want to be in harmony with them you don't want to really change things a lot because if I change this if I change my future I'm

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actually undermining my past it's a very different way of relating to the world so it's there's this continuity between the natural world the social world and the divine world and time is wrapped on itself in this really important way now

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what happens in the axial age is this way of looking at things is shattered now it doesn't go away there's aspects of our thinking that are still like this but what gets layered on top of it is a totally different

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worldview a totally different mythology for understanding the relationship between the self and the world so Charles Taylor's talks about this as the great dis embedding when the axial revolution hits this world is replaced by a different one now again I'm speaking mythologically

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here people will talk about it mythologically and you have to understand that doesn't mean the way we would think of it as a literal scientific thing nor is it what we would merely call metaphorical mythological is neither scientific nor just metaphorical

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now what's this new world well this new mythological worldview uses a mythology of two worlds the idea is this is the everyday world this is the world of the untrained mind this is a world that is beset by self-deception self-destruction

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the illusion violence chaos it's a world in which we are out of touch with reality but opposed to this is the real world and mythologically you can talk about this as two worlds but of course in a lot of the traditions the real

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world is just cutting through the illusion of the everyday world but the idea is the real world is how the trained mind the wise mind sees the world this is how the world looks when you're in touch with reality when your

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mind is not beset by illusion and delusion when you have that sense that this is how things really are this is a world also in which there is reduced suffering and violence precisely because the mind is not beset by foolishness

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precisely because it is not out of touch with reality now here wisdom is power oriented to be a wise individual is to learn how to acquire the power that was imbued at creation into the cycles it's like energies put into the system and it

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cycles around and then energy is put in the system it cycles around and you want to tap into that power wisdom is how to tap in to that power because what you're after is like long life live long and prosper

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as it's in the Star Trek when with ology for the Vulcans right you you want to be prosperous you want to live long you want to be free of conflict right you want to provide security for your offspring so that's a sense of wisdom

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that is still captured in our sense of the word prudence right being very Prudential is to have that sort of knowing how to fit in to the power structures of society how to make things work for you getting the most power and

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prosperity you can but over here there's a radical change wisdom changes because look you do not want to fit into this world because this is the world of suffering and violence it's a world in which you're out of touch with what's

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real and as we'll talk about it later you deeply desire to be in touch with reality it's one of your most powerful drives you don't want to conform to this world you want to be transformed out of this world you want to move from here to

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here now notice what's happening here the old shamanic enacted myth of soul flight flying above is being accepted into a new sense it's being exempted into this sense of self transcendence out of the everyday world into the real

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world and wisdom is now knowing how to make that transformative leap and meaning isn't about just connectedness as it was here but a special kind of connectedness a connectedness to the real world as opposed to a detrimental connectedness to an illusory world so

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meaning is changing and the notion of wisdom is changing and the notion of yourself what it is to be a self because here you're defined largely by how you fit in and of course that's always gonna be part of our

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definition I'm talking about emphasis here I'm not talking about absolute differences but here you're defined more by how you fit in but here you defined increasingly more by how you can self transcend self transform how you can grow as a person

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notice how pervasive this has become in our self understand notice how we don't like to be with people who aren't growing who aren't somehow transcending growing which way do you growing up right becoming more mature getting more in touch with themselves and reality so

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this is called the great dis embedding because now we we have a different relationship to the everyday world and this is a metaphor that you don't see before you don't see over here this is the idea that we're somehow strangers in

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the world we're pilgrims we don't belong here we belong there now as I keep saying I mean some people some people of course will literal eyes this and this is really one world in another world most people will see this alike we talk

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about Plato and others their understanding this as a mythological representation for the process of self transcendence and self transformation so once again we see the exaptation just like the shamans were engaged in excitation we see the acceptation of

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that shamanic ability into this new mythological framework so there's three places that I want to talk about in particular about this because they're the ones that we're going to talk a lot about I will mention China periodically throughout especially

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when I talk about Taoism but I want to talk about Greece and ancient Israel because those are the two foundational world mythologies for us those are two places and when theocracy or revolution took place in a way that has become

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deeply deeply constitutive of what we are how we are still here in our minds the way we experience ourselves and the world I also want to talk about India because India is the source of that of that how do I put it that source of the

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confluence between Buddhism and the Western world that we talked about in the first session together the mindfulness revolution mindfulness is a psycho technology that came from India so the axial revolution of Siddhartha Gautama and the Buddha we're going to talk about that and what I want

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to talk about is how each one of these areas in addition to the axial psycho technologies of literacy and coinage alphabetic literacy and coinage write how they also develop particular psycho technologies that have become internalized a lot of what you think is

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natural to you just part of how your mind works is actually culturally internalized it has been generated historically and you have internalized it culturally and you think of it just as how your mind works think again about literacy it is hard for you to remember

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and I mean to reenact what it was like to not be able to think in write like literate terms to imagine words in a similar way a lot of these ways of thinking these psycho technologies have become so second nature to us that we

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forget the historical origin and that's problematic because the degree to which we don't have a historical understanding is a degree to which we are going to be ignorant of the historical factors that are driving the meaning crisis let me

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foreshadow that meeting crisis right now so this is a mere foreshadowing we're going to come back to it this is a mythological way of thinking which allows us to articulate and train the psycho technologies of the axial revolution these psycho technologies of

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self-transcendence of wisdom and enhanced meaning but the problem is this mythology is failing for us now the scientific worldview is destroying the possibility of this for us in a way that might seem sort of cosmically or ironic the scientific worldview is returning us

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to a continuous cosmos there is no radical difference in kind between you and the primates that you evolved from naturally there isn't some radical difference in kind between your mind and your embodied existence right science is leveling the world we're returning to a

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one world we're going to talk about that but if we can no longer live in this mythology and that's what mythologies are they're they have to be livable people claim to believe this don't tell me what you believe tell me what you can

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practice tell me what's livable for you for most of us we can't live this anymore we still talk this way but we can't live it so here's part of the problem this is a foreshadowing how do we salvage the ability to

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cultivate wisdom self transcendence enhance meaning overcome self-deception realize realize who we are and how the world is when we can no longer use the mythological worldview in which it was born we are going through a reimburse of and increasing right Copernicus and

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Galileo REM bettas Darwin reom beds us Einstein reinvent us were that we're being reinvented back into the physical world but we don't want to lose all that we gained through the great dis embedding how do we reconcile those how

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do we live with the legacy of the actual revolution when we can no longer inhabit its world of view that's part of the problem that's only part now the place I want to turn to first is ancient Israel

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as I mentioned some of you have probably read parts of the Bible or at least heard parts of the Bible although biblical illiteracy is rising and that's problematic not not because I think people should be Christians or Jews I'm

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not here to proselytize but the degree to which you don't have a grasp of the grammar of the Bible is it re to which you don't have a grasp of the grammar of your own cognition and you may say I'm

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an atheist I don't care that's irrelevant I'm not talking about what you say I'm talking about how you think there's a big difference there grammar is how you put thoughts together it's not the vocabulary it's not what you say

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and so this is what Nietzsche meant and like like when he said I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar we still talk this way we still are filled with the god

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grammar of the Bible and you say no I'm not yes you go to a movie and you watch the person who falls in some way and then they have an insight and they are redeemed and they find their way back

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maybe it's through Alcoholics Anonymous or they come out of addiction that's biblical grammar okay again what matters here is how it shapes our sense of self and world I'm not advocating for a particular religion but of course I'm going to talk about the

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judeo-christian heritage precisely because I want to explain to you how these psycho technologies have been part of the very grammar not only of your cognition but of your existential sense of being so there's an important psycho technology that's invented or at least

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significantly developed by ancient Israel perhaps it was influenced from from Persia through Zarathustra but it's this idea and when I say it it's gonna seem to you like of course but it's not of course even saying of course is

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important remember that here's the idea it's a psycho technology of understanding time as a cosmic narrative as a story it's applying something again that's universal all cultures tell stories and we'll talk about the cognitive science of this later but you

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see this isn't a story this is a circle it's a cycle what kind of structure does a story how well the story has a beginning and has some crucial climax turning point and that and there's a resolution there's a

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direction to it there's a purpose to it so you get this idea of cosmic history of using our skills for story to explain how the cosmos is unfolding through time it's a radical idea so why is it radical

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well notice the difference here this this is not an open future right you're condemned to repeat that so cultures we're cyclical time is still prevalent Eastern cultures for example the repetition of the cycle is onerous it's horrible people think reincarnation for example

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within an Indian context is a wonderful I'll be born again that's good no that's horrible what you're trying to do is get free from those cycles because doing this again and again and again and again and again is terrifying

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moksha you want freedom nirvana you want cessation you want release from the cycle because there is no purpose to it but here the futures opened your actions now can change the future if you figure out how to participate

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remember that participatory knowing if you figure out how to participate in the story your actions can change the future there isn't the all at once creation at the beginning there's an ongoing creation through history and you can participate with God in the ongoing

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creation of the future how because how do stories operate they operate in terms of meaning and morality how you make meaning the moral content of your action decides how things are going to go see this is why the god of ancient Israel is

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such a different God if you look at the gods of the pre axial world look you've got a god and it's a god of a place a particular function here's the god of weaving or here's the god of ancient

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Thebes right the gods are located in place they're tied to a function they have no significant moral arc attached to them what's the God of the Old Testament what he or she like it's not bound to time in place

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think of the great story of the Old Testament the story of the Exodus what right here you have the Israelites and they are imprisoned they're imprisoned in the epitome of the Bronze Age world Egypt and God comes and liberates them

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and sets them on a journey towards a future that is promised the promised land this God moves through time and space the God of the Old Testament is the God of the open future that's why at first he has no name because to name something

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is to locate it to specify it to tie it down and for the longest time this God has no name and then when Moses finally challenges it and he reveals his name he says it's badly translated in the older

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versions of the Bible it's often translated as I am that I am but it acts in the Hebrew means I will be what I will be I am the God of the open future and you can participate with me in this

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this ongoing creation of the future because you can shape it you can cause it to come to resolution but you can also cause it to go off course the idea when I said of course to you remember the sense of time passing as a course we

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still take courses in universities this is what we have here and you're looking for turning points where the course turns and of course that's what you're looking for in a movie you know at some level that none of that is how the real

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world works you know at Psalm level come you do that your life doesn't unfold like a movie yet you love it you love going to a movie you love seeing this structure and participating in it and there's the great turning

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point where something is learned or a problem is solved and there's resolution and the future is now made so this God is interested in becomes progressively not now again you can't point and say there there's where it changed in the

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Bible but you can see there's aspects of a pre Axio god but as you read through the new as you read through the Old Testament God becomes more and more axial it becomes more and more the deity of something that you now take for

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granted progress the idea and right for us it's not just an idea right it's it's it's it's in the lifeblood it's in the very bones of your sense of self in your life is your life progressing or are you stuck

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is it moving forward this is this idea history progresses and it can degenerate and it can improve God becomes more and more a representative of that now there's a technical term for these turning points Kairos it's developed by the theologian

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Paul Tillich this is this sense of the crucial turning point getting things at the right time and the right place to turn things either right back on course or to further develop them now let's talk about that because again we're

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going to go back to talking about these set these senses of knowing that we've lost touch with important is this sense to off so people sometimes note and often humorously that the Bible will talk about sex sexual intercourse with the

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verb knowing so you'll get things like Adam knew his wife Eve and he's like what what does that mean and it means has sex with it's off in this sense and it's like what why what we don't use sex as a metaphor for

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knowledge you'd be surprised how many cultures actually do because this is again this is a participatory sense there's a course here and you're participating in it now what do I mean by participating you don't know it from the outside just having beliefs about it

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or just having skills you know it in this way you know it by identifying with it you change it while it's changing you and you're changing it while it's changing you you are immersed in it like a stream like a course of a river you

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are participating in it when you're making love with somebody you are participating in them you are identifying with them empathizing with them resonating with them you are changing them as they are changing you and it rises forgive me the pun to a

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climax to a turning point to a resolution see in ancient Israel faith this term has become useless for us now but faith didn't mean believing ridiculous things for which there is no evidence that is that is not that is a

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recent idea that is not what it meant faith was your sense of de ha faith was your sense that you're in this reciprocal realization you're in course you're on course you're involved and evolving with things it's your sense ah

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I'm on course or even your sense ah this is the turning point and I know what to do I know who I need to change into I knew how to turn myself and things notice you have this in your

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relationships you'll often be asking yourself how is this relationship going is it on course is it progressing is it growing is this the kind of person I want to be what's my am i becoming what's my sense of how I'm changing is this all going

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well that's the off now of course you can get it wrong you can think you're on course when you're actually dramatically off course you're trespassing to use older biblical language you're walking off the path you're no longer on course

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that's that's the basis of a word that we can't use anymore again because of our biblical literacy and the fact that we've lost touch with this sense of knowing in fact this word many people treat this word almost like like a

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comical word sin sinning isn't just doing something very immoral right in the New Testament the word that translates this is when you're shooting a bow and arrow so if you've done archery you can't shoot for where your eye tells you to

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look because you'll actually miss the bull's eye you have to have a kind of faith to sense right where you need to actually shoot so you don't miss the mark so the idea here is I'm trying to sense the course of things and if I'm

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self deluded or illusory I'm actually dramatically off course without realizing it that's the original meaning and so the idea is that human beings are thrown into this universe in which they have the option because it's an open future of participating in the creation

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of the future but of course human beings sin in the sense that they are self-deceptive they go off course so notice what the Hebrews are doing they're taking this movement from the everyday world to the real world and

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they're turning it into a historical story the way you go from the false world to the real world is you start now and you move towards the promised land they understand it historically but human being sinned they make decisions

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that steer the course of history away from its culmination and so the idea is God has to intervene periodically God has to redeem God has to do something to wake people up to remind them to help them to sense how they've gone of course

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and so that they can come back on course and so what you have is you have in the Old Testament you have the creation of the prophetic tradition prophets here's another thing that we've lost the sense of a prophet is not somebody who for who

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tells the future like some sort of psychic okay prophecy isn't about telling you what's going to be happening 200 or 300 years from now prophecy means a telling fourth yeah the job of the Prophet is to wake you up right now to

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how you are off course so a better analogy isn't the psychic when you so when you go to the psychic and oh you Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger or some crap like that that's not a good analogy

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for a prophet a better profit is when you and your loved one go into therapy and the therapist says something and it wakes you up the Holy crop this is how I'm going wrong this is how I'm off-course this is how I need to get

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back on track that's the job of a prophet and what you have in the prophetic tradition is you have an increasing emphasis on the morality of human decision-making more and more and again it's not perfect there's all kinds of pre axial stuff

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that's still woven in there and mixed up with it and mashed up with it but you do have more and more this discussion this exhortation to wake up to your moral responsibility for helping everybody to get back on track and to turn things

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back towards the promised land this idea of justice and righteousness and waking up so that we get back on track become endemic now think about how much and I've tried to show you three examples how much this is just how you naturally

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think of yourself you think of yourself as somebody who's on a journey you're starting here and you're trying to make a better self and you're trying to make the right decisions and you're trying to steer things you want your life to

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progress you want your culture to progress try to think about what how you would understand yourself how you would judge yourself and you couldn't make use of this notion of progress so what starts to happen is a commitment

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to more and more trying to cultivate the wisdom of deeply remembering God which doesn't mean reciting beliefs it means participating participating in the ongoing creation of the world shaping the future helping yourself your neighbors in your society to progress

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where that progress is measured mostly in terms of moral improvement increasing justice increasing flourishing increasing sense of people living up to their promise and this is what I ask you do you feel like you're living up to your promise is it an important thing

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for you if it is and I feel it's probably the case that for many of you it is that very way of thinking that's part of the grammar that we have inherited from the Hebrews it's part of the very way we think it's part of the

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warp and woof of our cognition now we're going to come back to this strand we're going to come back and look at a particular way of understanding Kairos that became right central and Christianity because what Christianity did is it made a really radical claim it

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claimed that this Kairos was found in a particular person and what's that what that's going to do is it's going to personalize all of this in a really dramatic way but before we do that I want to switch back over to what's

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happening in a similar time in ancient Greece as I mentioned the psycho technology of alphabetic literacy is taken to the Greeks but the Greeks do something that's very important and it helps to explain right some of the differences we

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see in the Greek axial revolution from the ancient Hebrew actual revolution now the Greeks do something that again seems inconsequential now but they add vowels to the alphabet and it's like oh well so what well the thing is when you add

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vowels you really again increase how easy it is to process information so let's stop here because we need to be a cognitive science because this ease of processing really matters so I want to introduce you to an important idea from

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cognitive science this is the idea of cognitive fluency so we've got increasing experimental evidence for this basic kind of fact when you increase the ease at which people can process information regardless of what that information is they come to believe it is more real

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they have more confidence in it etc now that can be something very simple it can be as simple as changing the font contrast between the letters and the page so consider two individuals Tom and Susan Tom is reading our words in which

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the color contrasts between the letters and the page isn't as good as the color contrast that Susan's reading they're reading exactly the same thing they can both clearly read it it's just the font difference makes it easier for Susan

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than for Tom they read the same thing if you ask both of them well how true is what you read Susan's more likely to say that was true which is more likely to have confident in it regardless of the content the

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fluency of your processing actually increases your confidence in it your sense of how real the picture it's giving you is now it's not really ease in some simple sense because right it has to do more with how well your brain is accessing information

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applying it it's very complicated right but what I'm telling you is when I do something that increases your cognitive fluency you get an enhanced sense of your brain your brain get generates an enhanced sense that you're actually in

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touch with things we'll talk about this later that turns out to be a good policy your brain is using it's a very good idea for your brain to try and use the fluency of its own processing as a

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measure of how much it's in touch with reality by the way when you get a lot of fluency you of course are going to get into the flow State so when the Greeks introduce vowels they improve the fluency of alphabetic

Speaker A

literacy they ramp up how powerful it is they also just introduced something else they introduced a standardized reading from left to right which you now take for granted many of you know that other languages go the other way

Speaker A

Hebrews read this way for example that has an impact on your cognition first of all it's standardized that improves the fluency why does it improve your fluency when this is standard you know always if you look at Egyptian hieroglyphs they

Speaker A

can go up they can go down they can go this way they can go that way when you standardize things that increases the fluency of the processing so they rats it up this power of literacy to enhance cognition they're also developing

Speaker A

something else so the Greeks don't form a unified nation state they have individual city-states that are in competition with each other and in Athens in particular and oftens is going to be the hotbed of the axial revolution in Greece although not the only place in

Speaker A

Athens you have slowly the emergence of democracy now it's it's a particularly problematic form of democracy it's direct democracy we'll talk about stuff like that later but what this does is this puts a premium on argumentation and debate so the Greeks start to sort of

Speaker A

speed up the actual revolution of their own cognition they enhance the effects of alphabetic literacy they enhance write the use of reason and reflection and so they start to do things that again don't happen before lots of cultures were doing arithmetic but the

Speaker A

Greeks invent mathematics they invent geometry they start to create abstract symbol systems for their own sake now that's what's going on in what's basically being invented in ancient Greece is this capacity for rational argumentation that's the psycho technology again you think of this no I

Speaker A

want to be cleaner I'm not claiming that other groups or people are irrational or there can't be reasonable I'm not being ethnocentric but you get the explicit training of rational argumentation as a core psycho technology in ancient Greece

Speaker A

now that is going to have very important consequences now it's interesting again is how this comes in to ancient Greece I'm going to introduce you to two individuals who are sort of the epitome of the axial revolution in Greece Pythagoras and

Speaker A

Socrates you know Pythagoras of course because of an important mathematical theorem the Pythagorean theorem now Pythagoras is a very interesting person because he seems to be people he belongs to cornfield makes this argument very well right Cornford mixes argument

Speaker A

very well he belongs to a group a group of individuals that are around you know sort of just coming out of that Dark Age around 600 BCE these these individuals were called the divine man it's pretty clear that these men seem to represent a

Speaker A

rediscovery of shamanic psycho technologies they seem to they have a lot of associations with sort of capacities for healing for flying through the air and so a lot of this is is legendary right it's mythological that's not literal but Pythagoras is a real person

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now of course there's lots and lots of legendary material around him but the legend even points towards these important aspects he seems to have gone through shamanic training he engaged in something called the Thunderstone ceremony which involved him isolating

Speaker A

himself in a cave and going through some radical transformation and then coming out of it he seems to have experienced soul flight because he talked about the capacity for the psyche to be liberated from the body he was very tall and he dressed like a

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god but no one found it offensive for him to do so at least not the people that followed him he discovers in this right he he discovers the octave he discovers that there's mathematical proportions in the world he comes to

Speaker A

this realization that there's new psycho technologies of rational reflection and mathematics give us access to abstract patterns that we are not directly aware of like we all take it for granted that we know what an octave is and we know

Speaker A

there can express by ratios but that was his discovery so what he does is he takes this idea about realizing through music and math these abstract patterns and then he links them to the project the shamanic ability to engage in self transcendence

Speaker A

he comes up with the idea that were somehow trapped in this world but we can learn to fly above it we can fly free like the shaman but he's allied it explicitly to the actual project of self transcendence of getting in touch with

Speaker A

the rationally realized patterns because that will liberate us that will change and transform us now Pythagoras gives us a lot of the words that we take for granted I said earlier that I didn't like calling the Prix axial world the

Speaker A

cosmos because Pythagoras actually invents this word cosmos he's the first person to describe the universe as a cosmos now many of you probably treat those two terms as synonymous universe the one verse and cosmos they're not try to think of a word that's actually

Speaker A

related to cosmos that familiar with so the word that might not come to mind is the word cosmetic cosmetics come from cosmos what it caused medics do they right reveal the beauty of things how beautiful and ordered they are so Pythagoras has the

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idea that if we go we can use music and mathematical thinking and practices that engage in this altered state of consciousness and he is integrating them all together it's not quite clear how but what we can do is we can transcend

Speaker A

and see the world as beautiful and we're going to come back and talk about this how when people have awakening experiences they suddenly experience the world as a cosmos as radically beautiful now remember Pythagoras because he's gonna have a huge influence on somebody

Speaker A

we're gonna talk about Plato but there's somebody who had an even greater influence on Plato and somebody who really epitomizes the axial revolution in ancient Greece in fact he has a revolution named after him this is called the Socratic revolution and the

Speaker A

person we want to talk about is Socrates I'm going to argue how Socrates epitomizes the Greek form of the axial revolution and then what we're going to do is we're going to see how Plato takes Socrates and Pythagoras and puts them

Speaker A

together and how Socratic and platonic your cognition is how it's part of the grammar of how you think but once again even though that's the grammar of how we understand meaning and wisdom and what a self is and how we how

Speaker A

we grow how we self transcend how we get in touch with reality we are no longer in the worldview of Pythagoras do we do you actually I mean that's seriously do you actually experience the universe as a cosmos

Speaker A

we'll take a look at that the next time we're together thank you very much for your time [Music] you you

Topics:Axial Revolutioncontinuous cosmosalphabetic literacymetacognitionmythCharles Taylorgreat disembeddingBronze Age collapseAncient IsraelGreek philosophy

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