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[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis last time we were discussing the actual age within ancient India and we were figuring we were focusing in on a pivotal figure of Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha and we had
Vervaeke's lecture on higher states of consciousness: how the awakened state transforms perception of world and self, linking mindfulness, insight, and cognitive science.
Key Takeaways
- Higher states of consciousness are a widespread, cross-cultural phenomenon that must be explained scientifically and evaluated philosophically.
- These states involve expanded attention, heightened clarity, and a perceived unity of world and self.
- Insight and cognitive fluency are central mechanisms, and disruptive practices can be used to induce transformative shifts in perception.
- A good theory must be both descriptively adequate (explaining mechanisms) and prescriptively adequate (justifying trust in these states).
What the video covers
- Recaps the previous episode on the Axial Age and the Buddha's story, including the having vs. being modes and modal confusion.
- Frames the problem of higher states of consciousness: alternative states regarded as more real than everyday consciousness, central to axial religions and philosophies.
- Sets criteria for a theory of these states: descriptive adequacy (explaining experiences across psychological, informational, and brain levels) and prescriptive adequacy (rational justification for trusting them).
- Notes that 30-40% of people report awakening experiences, drawing on surveys and work by Newberg and Taylor.
- Describes how the world is experienced in these states: heightened clarity, brightness, beauty, aliveness, and a sense of underlying oneness.
- Links the expanded perception to attentional scaling from mindfulness, citing Blake's 'world in a grain of sand' as capturing simultaneous breadth and detail.
- Describes the self in these states: a profound peace and often the disappearance of the ordinary autobiographical sense of self.
- Explains insight and fluency: insight produces sudden spikes in cognitive fluency, and a continuity hypothesis connects everyday skilled coping to these experiences.
- Draws on Merleau-Ponty and Dreyfus on embodied, optimal cognitive grip, comparing it to skilled action in sports and combat.
- Introduces psychotechnologies that deliberately disrupt habitual framing ('bad invariants') to enable radical developmental change.
Chapters
- 00:00Recap of the Buddha and Modal Confusion
- 03:36Framing the Problem of Higher States of Consciousness
- 07:36Criteria for a Descriptively and Prescriptively Adequate Theory
- 10:45Experiencing the World in Awakened States
- 14:58Experiencing the Self and Loss of Ego
- 22:22Insight, Fluency, and the Continuity Hypothesis
- 33:00Embodied Optimal Grip and Skilled Coping
- 45:00Psychotechnologies and Disruptive Insight
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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been talking about his particular story we talked about the two modes of being that were being represented in his story of leaving the palace the having mode and the being mode and we talked about modal confusion and about overcoming it
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we followed him to where he's sitting under the Bodhi tree and he achieves a deep kind of realization a deep state of enlightenment along the way we had discussed what mindfulness is how mindfulness operates through attentional scaling and how it can increase your
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cognitive flexibility your capacity for insight and then we were trying to draw this all together with some cognitive science a discussion of what is it to experience enlightenment now I'm not offering right now a complete account or anything like a comprehensive theory of
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enlightenment we're gonna be slowly working towards that as we move through this lecture series but I do want to get into and can continue the discussion of these higher states of consciousness so if you remember they're very problematic
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but that they're at the core of many of the axial age world religions and foundational philosophies this is the idea that people have an alternative state of consciousness that they regard as somehow more real than their everyday state of consciousness and that's
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problematic precisely because we tend to judge realness by how well we get an an overall coherence in our intelligibility how we're making sense of things but in these altered states that are very different from our everyday consciousness and therefore do not go
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here with it people do the alternative instead of rejecting it the way we reject dreaming for example because it doesn't go here with our everyday experience people reject the everyday experience as illusory and they say that this state of consciousness
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somehow gives them and improved access to reality and as you remember as we've been going through the actual age revolution and the sense of wisdom and meaning that is attended upon it this ability to transcend through illusion and get connected to what is more real
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is central to what wisdom means and having some deep sense of connectedness to reality is also central to what it is to regard one's life as authentically meaningful in some fashion so that was the problem we had set up the problem of
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higher states of consciousness now I want to start by talking about what it's like to give a theory that we talked about this also last time we want a theory that's most descriptively adequate and prescriptively adequate a descriptive
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theory should tell me like give me a good explanation for why these higher states of consciousness have the experience feel that they have why they and why they're able to produce these deep kinds of transformations because if you remember what typically happens is
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because people have sensed this deep connectedness to reality and because being connected to reality is one of fundamental way in which we makes our lives meaningful people will radically transform their whole lives their sense of self their interpersonal relationship
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in order to maintain and enhance that connectedness to this deepened reality so we need to explain give a descriptively adequate explanation and this has to work at multiple levels and this is where cognitive science is so important because of the way it tries to
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bridge between these various levels and disciplines we need to give an account of the psychological processes of the information processes and ultimately the brain processes that are at work then we need a prescriptively adequate theory of higher states of consciousness we need
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an account that explains why it might be considered rationally justifiable that these states authorised and legitimate such transformations can we see why these states should be listened to when they claim to give us access to a deeper reality now in order to carry out
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the first one seeing what the said harder was going through right when he's achieving this higher state of consciousness this awakened state and if you remember last time we talked about how concept how comprehensively extended this is not only qualitatively through
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the world religions but just quantitatively through the population a 30 to 40 percent of people report these awakening experiences and the resulting deep transformation so in order to get through that let's talk about what what does it feel like to be in such a state
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and because we have these surveys and we have the work of newburgh and Taylor and we have lots of first-person accounts we can draw some general pictures of what's going on so there's three components we want to look at we want to look at how
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is the world being experienced how is the self being experienced and how is the relationship between the world and their self being experienced so let's start on the world side so people report the following things they report a
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tremendous sense of clarity and this is both perceptual and cognitive so the world seems extremely clear to them and make sense to them in a way that it hasn't before the perceptual part of that clarity is often experienced as
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bright things are shining and that's the original meaning of glory for example to go back to the Bible for example the term that is most often used to describe God is glory which is not a moral term it's a term about how sort of shining
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God is how how bright it is now you remember that's a feature that people also reliably report in the flow experience that everything seems very vivid and in bright and intense now what's interesting is that while people describe this clarity and notice
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how this is going to pick up on what we talked about when we talked about mindfulness they talked about both an expansion of vision so it's very comprehensive they get almost like they're somehow aware of the whole of
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the world but they also are aware of finite details so this is captured for example in Blake's famous poem right to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower to hold infinity in the palm of your hand and to spend
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eternity in an hour so you get this deep interpenetration of sort of everything and the finite details that you can see that so what you're getting is this massive expansion of that attentional scale in that we talked about mindfulness enhancing and
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thereby enhancing our capacity to break frame and make frame and get fundamental insight and pay attention to the word insight seeing into reality so overall there's an increased sense of making sense of things right making sense of things so the world is both intricate
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and interesting in this extended and enhanced and shining way so almost universally people describe this experience as the world is beautiful it's deeply beautiful to them and we'll come back at some point to talk about the connections between beauty and truth
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particularly the work of scar II about this the world is very alive it seems very alive during these experience because it's so pregnant with energy and significance and all of this all of this comprehensiveness but intricate detail the shining the beauty
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the making sense all of this comes together in the notion of oneness there's somehow an underlying oneness to everything there's deep and profound integration which of course makes sense given that very off than when we are explaining something we
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are finding what unifies and integrates them together what's happening on the side of the self what's happening on the side of the self is people report a profound sense of peace and this is not peace in an empty just lack of conflict
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it's very similar to what we talked about in Plato and you're probably seeing Plato's ideas about an agog a resonating with this I hope you're seeing that but remember in Plato right that inner state of peace is one of
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inner harmony when all of the various components of your personality and your cognition are mutually optimally working together in concert and this is the kind what people report the often report that this is the greatest sense of peace
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they've ever experienced in their life and you remember in Plato this sense of peace right is connected to and resonates with this enhanced sense of connectedness to reality and interestingly enough that's what we're seeing in these and these descriptions
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people also described experiencing profound joy now of course we've lost the sense of what this word means we've lost it precisely in words like enjoyment where enjoyment means having fun or pleasure but joy is not the experience or fun or pleasure joy is the
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positive emotion you have when you experience a deep connection to what is good so joy is the experience you have of this is really really good interestingly people often report a fundamental change in their sense of self and we're going to come back to
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this they report two things they'll often report that their normal sense of self has disappeared their eccentric autobiographical sense of self has disappeared and if you remember that's that's continuous with what we saw when people are in the flow
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state they report that self-consciousness that auto-buy graphical narrative self is disappearing they often also report remembering in the sense we talked about when we talked about sati and remembering the being mode they remember they say I remember my true self I remember who I really am
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so there's a profound connection inward to the core machinery of the self that is at one with a profound sense of connecting to the underlying pattern that governs and makes intelligible reality people report that in this state they have a tremendous sense of energy
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and vitality again analogous to the flow state and finally they report that they're going state often use this term there is a tremendous sense of insight and understanding again continuous with the flow State now what about their relation so this is deep
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connection profound connectedness deep at one mint again like the flow state but even more people feel so at one that they start to feel that they're participating in their reality that they're connected to this they start to feel like they're sharing identity to it
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and this your way of thinking about this is when we talked about Aristotle's notion of the conformity theory of knowing there they feel so deeply conformed to this underlying reality from the very core of their being that they are experiencing an identification
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with it but this participatory knowing is so superlative and it's so profound and so transformative that inevitably people to say that the experience that this connection is ineffable and we we noted this last time we were talking about how is it that these experiences
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that have no right articulable declarative content they're ineffable you can't put them into words you can't put them into propositional thought nevertheless are considered so so loaded with so capable of bearing the signature of ultimate reality or realness for people so we
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need a descriptive theory that can account for all of these features the features of how the world is experienced of the self is experienced and the relation now what I've been showing you already of course is deep continuity
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with the flow experience I'm not claiming it's a flow experience it's more than that but I'm showing you that there's continuity just like I showed you that there's continuity between the flow experience and the insight experience and that's why when people are having
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these higher states of consciousness they are also proposing a very profound insight and notice how often when you have an insight it's also ineffable to you you don't know how the insight arose or what comes how it came to be you just
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like ah I just see it now some other important things we should know about these states these states are often preceded by disruptive strategies disruptive strategies these are strategies that are designed to disrupt your normal cognitive functioning and to alter your state of
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consciousness so they can range from very long-term strategies to very short-term strategies long-term strategies can be the ones we've already described likes it harvests it hard I was engaged for six years and these practices these mindfulness practices of
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meditation and contemplation and they bring about right a very long-term incremental but nevertheless also profound disruption in your normal state of consciousness and cognition people are also can pursue very short-term disruptive strategies these include things like fasting sexual and sleep
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deprivation the emember we talked about how shamans will make use of these strategies in order to induce the shamanic state there are they will expose himself to drumming chanting all of these things disrupt your normal level of cognition and of course when we
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talked about this as well people will make use of psychedelics precisely because of the way they are so deeply disruptive of your normal cognition and your normal state of consciousness so what we know is that combinations well sorry that's a little too strong what we
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have good some initial good evidence is that combinations of these strategies can be very good there was a recent experiment coming out of the Griffiths lab in 2018 in which people who were practicing mindfulness and then took psychedelics tended to have a more
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enhanced experience than people who are just taking the psychedelics for example so you can combine the strategies together they can be mutually supportive now what's important for this as we'll come back and take a look at more carefully in a few minutes is disruptive
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strategies are also central to setting up insight and that should make sense to you given what we've talked about you have to do a lot of break frame before you can open up the possibility of making an entirely new
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new friend there was a recent experiment run by Aiden and now in 2017 they had they has 701 participants 69 percent of them reported this what I called on to normativity this sense of the enhanced realness of their higher states of
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consciousness and this was actually predictive of significant improvement across many dimensions of their life right there was significant improvement in family life health sense of purpose spirituality and will and I release from the anxiety and fear of death so the
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claim that these states do guide transformation has received empirical backing now Yadin also brings out something important than that study that you don't see very well articulated in Newberg and in Taylor and this is one of the disruptive strategies that are that
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people are often using and it bleeds into the phenomenology by that I mean the experiential feel and structure of these experience right and this is the notion of decentering so when people describe these experiences they shift from right a very sort of first-person
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orientation and egocentric to an a low centric so they are not so egocentric this is why this is called decentering they're speaking more from like a third-person perspective and right allocentric so let me just give you a quick
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understanding of the difference between these terms I can describe my motion egocentric lis right things that are in front of me behind me to the right of me to the left of me right and that of course varies by how I'm oriented
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because it is relative to me but I can also describe my position allocentric lis I can say where I am relative to the North Pole for example right so the first is a first-person egocentric way of moving through the world
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the second is an eccentric third-person now extend that out people are much less egocentric li oriented when they're describing the experience of their state then they are normally they're much more allocentric li oriented and that makes sense given
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how intensified the experience of reality is to them it's like the salience of reality is finally capable of eclipsing the narcissistic glow of our own ego and for a moment at least or for several moments we get release right
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and this is an important idea Nirvana means to blow out to extinguish or the vedanta term moksha is release we get a release from right the imprisonment the self idealization by the super salience and therefore the bullshitting of our
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own ego centric perspective I mean do you not sometimes wish to be free from the prison cell of the super salience of your own ego so as I've been suggesting to you these higher states of consciousness have a
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lot of features of insight I've already talked about the insight member we did the nine dot problem for example those aha moments because you get in that moment of insight you get a flash of insight you get sort of super salience
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things are making sense to you you get insight as it's almost visual into an underlying pattern a unity a oneness that wasn't there before your sense of what's relevant and important has been altered and this ability to radically
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make sense to find coherence an underlying intelligible integrative pattern this we now know from current work is directly predictive of the experience of meaning in life so Samantha heinzelman whose work I recommend to you I also got to meet
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Samantha in person and got to talk to her about this but what she has is good experimental evidence of the following if you give people a bunch of scenes that make sense to them that they can sort of determine
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an underlying pattern - and then ask them how meaningful their lives are they will rate their lives as more meaningful the act do you understand the act of making sense of finding coherence actually makes people experience their lives as
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more meaningful they're not being shown profound pictures of or deeply dramatic or narrative scenes or emotionally like they're just showing some very basic pictures but the act of making sense of finding coherence elevates the sense of how meaningful their lives are so start
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to put this together if you were to have an insight that would give you an even more you know sudden increase in your sense of meaning in life and what if it's in flow well it's going to be even
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more enhanced sense of meaning in life and we already know that the more often you have flow experiences the more meaningful you find your life and now what if it's beyond that what if it's a higher state of consciousness
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that brings you this radical sense of deep intelligibility not only of the world but of yourself in both directions at the same time well that was going that is going to give you a profound sense of increased meaning in life now
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if you get try to put this together if you get enhanced meaning in life coupled to an enhanced sense of understanding and that actually does guide you in improving your life that is going to build a tremendous amount of
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confidence in you that you have found a path towards self transcendence and wisdom we can start to understand some of the Buddha's confidence now what do we know about these flashes of insight well tow Belinsky and Reber in 2010 this
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is a different reaper not the implicit learning reaper right talk about how insight is a fluency spike although it's related to flow it's not the same thing fluency is a general it's a general property of all of your cognitive
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processing so how can we understand it well initially people thought that fluency was a sense of how easy it was to process things so the basic idea is if I make it easier for you to process information you will rate that
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information as better more trustworthy more believable regardless of the actual semantic content so for example it compared this right to this the contrast isn't as great and if I were to get you to read some test text in black and the exact same text in the
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orange you will rate what you read in the black as better you'll have more confident it more likely to be true the semantic content is exactly equal it's because it's easier for you to process the black and white contrast than the
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orange on white contrast now it turns out it's not quite ease of processing just because simply repeating the stimulus doesn't trigger this sense of fluency it's more like how accessible information is how applicable it is I would argue that it's how well your
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system is zeroing in on right the relevant information how much has the information before matted for you so that you can zero in on relevant information a way of thinking about this to help make sense of it is with our
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discussion of psycho technology's alphabetic literacy made your cognitive processing more fluent and that improved your ability your power your cognitive power and by improving your cognitive power that gives you an enhanced sense of how real and important the
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information you're processing is so the idea here is when you are fluent you are processing information very efficiently when you have according to toe bilinski and Libra when you have an insight experience what you're getting is a sudden spike in fluency you're getting a
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significant increase in how fluently you're processing and therefore you start to judge the information that you're processing therein as likely being more real now is this is this an absolute perfect rule no but the fact that it's domain-general
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the fact that it seems to be part of our evolutionary heritage and there's also some independent logical argumentation indicating that this fluency heuristic that your brain uses is actually a very good strategy it's very generally the case not
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perfectly not certainty but very generally the case that in real world situations if you are processing them very fluently you are picking up on the real patterns so insight is we zeroing in and then we talked about flow as an
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insight cascade which is even more zeroing it and it's an it's coupled to implicit learning in which you're picking member you're picking up on bigger patterns that you're not consciously aware of you can't put them into declarative utterances do you see
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what's happening here so in the higher states of the higher states of consciousness like flow you're getting this enhanced fluency so your brain is working very optimal E and the implicit learning is picking up on very complex patterns and you're tending to zero in
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on the causal ones rather than the correlational ones I'm using all of this machinery we've already discussed because as I've mentioned in the flow State you're starting to get a lot of the features of the mystical experiences and ultimately those mystical
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experiences that can be transformative it by enhancing meaning in life and your sense of connectedness to realness you get the at one mint in the flow State the radical loss of self-consciousness you're not egocentric you although you know there's tremendous energy it feels
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effortless to you it's graceful there's a super salience it's intrinsically rewarding it's like evolutionarily marked in its domain general and universal all this stuff we've talked about this is all being triggered in the higher states of consciousness okay so
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this leads to a hypothesis I want to present to you okay this so this hypothesis is a continuity hypothesis why are we doing this why are we doing this we are doing this because we want a scientifically legitimate
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scientifically plausible explanation of what's going on when somebody claims enlightenment like Siddhartha Gautama when somebody claims radical self transcendence like Plato because we want something that gives a good explanation for what's actually happening and a good justification for why somebody should
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follow and be guided by these transformative experiences okay so what's the continuity hypothesis the continuity hypothesis is the idea so this is a hypothesis I'm giving you although I as I was doing research on this Newberg independently for me we
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haven't spoken has also come up with is a version of the continuity hypothesis it's not as developed as the one I'm going to give you but it's completely consonant with it so the idea is fluency gets enhanced an insight insight gets to
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enhanced in flow alright so you've seen all those arguments already and then the idea is as I'm trying to show you flow experiences can be enhanced into mystical experiences and then there are mystical experiences that can bring about a transformative experience these
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are the higher states of consciousness in which people right are willing to transform will come back to the problem of transformative experience so the continuity hypothesis is basically the same machineries being used but it is being exact 'add remember excitation it
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is being progressively exempted into more and more powerful processing that can afford what I'm going to argue a rationally justifiable guidance into the kinds of transformation that we are seeking when we are seeking to cultivate wisdom and enhance meaning in life when we are
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seeking to awaken from the meaning crisis we are trying to invoke one of these awakening experiences and remember that's what Buddha means the awakened one so Newburg argues that if you have a lot of these kinds of experiences what
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he calls little enlightenment experiences or regular insights that this will eventually produce these kinds of experiences and I so this is not only a continuity hypothesis this is a priming hypothesis and I support that as well the more you are practicing mindfulness
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which we know is predictive of insight and flow we know that mindfulness practices are predictive of mystical experiences we know that they're connected to transformative experiences the more you can prime this pump the more you will be able to bring about
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this enhance connectedness this enhanced and agar gay alright so this I think idea of the continuity hypothesis will help us to begin to explain what's going on in the higher states of consciousness and eventually use the very same
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machinery that we talked about in explaining it and to justify to give a rational justification for it all right so we know for example that in flow there has to be a relevant expertise all right remember we've talked about this
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the flow state is when your skills your expertise right can meet the demands of the situation if you don't have the relevant skills you can't get into the flow state right so I can get into the flow State as a martial artist because I
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have cultivated the expertise I can get in as a flow state while lecturing because I've been doing it for 24 years I have the relevant expertise so what we might ask and what you should ask me right now you say well join like what
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flowing in these higher states of consciousness what's what's what what expertise are you using well what I want to argue to you is it's a fundamental kind of expertise one that's central to your everyday experience of making sense
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of the world on a day-to-day basis so this ultimately goes back to work by Marlo Ponte especially in the book the phenomenology perception but the people who I'm going to most often refer to the work of Herbert Dreyfuss breakfast is
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famous within cognitive science for bringing the work of Marla Ponte and others into cognitive science and also the work of Dreyfuss and Taylor this is the Charles Taylor that we've already talked about with connection to the extra revolution in a book called
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retrieving realism so what process is being optimized here okay so Dreyfuss and others talk about write what they call optimal grip now that's so I mean they meet it metaphorically because they're talking about cognition but that is such a wonderful Lee felicitous term
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because again it harkens back to the conformity theory of cognition a contact epistemology that of course Charles Taylor introduced us to now what do they mean by that so part of this is the idea that when we're let's talk about it
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first perceptually when I'm trying to perceive an object especially if I don't know what the object is initially I don't remain static okay I'm gonna move around the object until I get to a place that gets into a tradeoff relationship
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remember we've talked about these trade-off relationships before what trade-off relationship I want okay I want to get to a place where I can see as many details of the cup as possible so that was sort of zooming in right oh
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wow but if i zoom in too much I lose on the other end I don't get a sense of the gestalt remember that I don't get a sense of the overall thing so what I do is I move the cup around so
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that I get a place where I get the best optimization for my needs because all it's always relative to what I'm doing I get a best optimization between the overall grasp of the cup its Gestalt and a grasp of its details so I'm trying to
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get a dynamic balance between that's why when you draw faces you draw them from the perspective of the optimal grip you have on them you represent a face in such a way right you draw a face in such
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a way that you try to get as much of the whole and as much as the detail together you don't draw a face by like drawing someone's eyes really in detail and you don't draw a face by zooming out right
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too far you try and get exactly that right balance so a lot of perception you're unaware of this because you learned how to do this when you are like a young child but think about for example again if you're learning a
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martial art okay just as integral earning how to perceive your opponent part of what you're trying to do is try to get an optimal grip on your opponent so right in Tai Chi for example we talked about Tiger Eyes we you don't
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want a hard focus on the person's face one of the mistakes that many people make going into a confrontation is the hard focus on face are they hard focus on weapon we know this from psychological research by the way you
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get people who have been held up you know what they can give you an accurate description of the gun not the person who was holding them up because they hard focus right they lose that soft vigilance right so
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what you want to do is you want to get the right and it takes practice right you want to flow over the person you don't want to be sort of flowing in a blurry fashion you want to get this
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sense where you've got a sense of their whole body right but you can zero in on details and then you also are trying to get an optimal grip on your own body so for example gonna take a stance right and the point
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about the stance right is to try and give you an optimal sense right give you an overall sense so now I'm aware of my whole body right but I'm also aware of it in connection to the details of like where my fingers
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are where my wrists are what my joints are doing and I'm taking a stance that I can ease that's multi apt I can easily transform it into what I need to do I get an optimal grip you do this
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cognitively Eleanor Rosch pointed this out in terms of the categories you use so you will describe things as a cat or a dog that's how you'll usually talk about it you usually won't go a level up and say oh that's a mammal so this
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creatures walking by on the road and somebody says hey look at the mammal don't be weird right now they might go down to another level like there's the cocker spaniel but generally they're doing that because they have some intimate familiarity most
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of us would say hey look at the dog wash calls this the basic level why do we default to the basic level in the way we talk about why is this a table why is this a marker right why do we default to
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the basic level because it's how we get our cognitively optimal grip you see there's two things I want to trade off in when I'm categorizing things here's my category right I want as much similarity within the category as I can
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get right but I want as much difference between two categories and those aren't a trade-off because as I go higher up right I get much more abstract and I lose the specific differences when I go down here right I'm getting too specific
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I'm losing the broad generality we've talked about this before you're always trying to balance between getting remember the higher the higher states of consciousness and as detailed as you can and those are always in a trade-off relationship so you talk about dogs and
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cats because that's your way of getting an optimal cognitive grip on the world remember we did this the cat remember we talked about how you're simultaneously going up to the gestalt and down to the detail you're optimally gripping between
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the Gestalt of the word and the features of the letter and you're doing it right now you've got a way of paying attention that allows you to read and you had to practice that optimal gripping you're going into a first date what do you do
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well you're trying to get a sense of the person now here's where the term optimal grip is a little Ian felicitous but so don't don't read anything miss read any sexual misconduct into my use of the term I'm using in the technical sense
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but you're trying to get an optimal grip on the other person and it's very difficult notice how your your toggling your attention and your interaction and you know this because of the kinds of advice your friends give you they'll say
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things right I happen to be straight so they'll say to me for example you know look into her eyes but not too much smile but not too much laughs not too often ask the questions but not too many
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and mix it up between these strategies but not chaotically and you're like sort of uh and yet here's the thing you do it it works at least sometimes you figure out you find that sweet spot where you're getting the sense of the person
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both as a whole and in detail I'm giving you multiple examples you're always engaged because you're always trading between these trade offs you're always optimally gripping so you have to do this domain-general you have to do it in every domain when you're
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swimming going on a day reading right looking at an object you're trying to get an optimal grip and you have practiced this skill so that you're extremely proficient you do it without realizing it Herbert Dreyfuss is one of
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his favorite examples you know how close to stand to somebody how close should you stand to somebody in order to get an optimal grip on the interaction there is no algorithm it's like always stand 4 inches that's ridiculous
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always stand one foot it depends on the context it depends on the person but you have that skill most of you are not socially awkward so here's what I'm proposing to you what if you didn't when what have you got into a flow state that
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wasn't if there isn't the flow state of doing a martial art isn't the flow state of playing music like a jazz or something what if what you were getting into a flow state about was the ability to optimally grip the world what have I
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made it really challenging by altering your state of consciousness disrupting your normal framing and then opening up because right don't remember what's happening in this higher state you're both opening up your attention and zeroing in to see the world in a grain
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of sand what if you were all what if you had this all optimal grip but it wouldn't be on just one object it would be a dynamical flowing optimal grip on the world and yourself the most comprehensive attempt
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to make sense not intellectually theoretically but optimally gripping reality this deep conformity so what I'm proposing to you is that what's happening in a higher state of consciousness is that people are flowing in their capacity to cognitively perceptually and even with the very
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machinery of their self get an optimal grip on both the world and themselves and that's why this relation is experienced as so intensely powerful and so intensely revealing now this would help to make sense of things because again if there's a deep continuity
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between the higher states of consciousness and things like flow and insight that would help to explain why the disruptive strategies are so important for getting into the higher states of consciousness because disruptive strategies are central as I mentioned to insight you have to bake
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break up the bad framing now you can do that by using mindfulness and breaking frame you also are naturally disposed to do this your mind wanders your mind distracts you from your task and many of us find this annoying it's like ah why
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can't I keep my mind on something but why is mind wandering so hardwired into us and one of my former students and now colleague and good friend Zak Irving he's becoming one of the world experts on mind wandering I would point you to
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his work if you want to go into it in depth what I would want to say for here and I think Zak would agree with me on this is that one of the things that mind wandering does is enhances your capacity
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for insight because by distracting you from how you framed a situation it can help you return and break up that fixated frame and there's work by Siegel and others showing that moderate amounts of distraction actually enhance your cognitive flexibility the reason why we
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mind wander amongst other reasons I'm not saying it's the sole reason but one of the things it does is it helps disrupt our framing so that we can break frame and make a new frame that's often why and and and this is why people have
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built a whole mythology around incue bation go and sleep on it or go for a walk or take a shower basically what you're doing is a disruptive strategy of distraction right as I mentioned you can deliberately more deliberately engage in
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a disruptive strategy through mindfulness practices we know experimentally that if you give a person problem and you introduce entropy noise into the problem a moderate amount that can help them have an insight and we know for example that when your brain is
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engaging in insight there's good reason to believe as I've mentioned that there's a significant shift we talked about this between the left and the right hemisphere that's an internal disruptive strategy so your brain has all these strategies and you can learn
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some psycho technologies that enhance all this powerful disruption so the disruptive machinery that's integral to insight can be exacta dand enhanced to bring about a higher state of consciousness so what what these all of these disruptive strategies do with
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insight is what's called d automatisation so you remember with the nine dot problem you automatically and remember this because we're gonna need this when we talk about other things like stoicism you automatically unconsciously saw it as a square you framed it in terms of
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the square you automatically unconsciously right formulated it as they connected on the problem and then that automatic framing blocks you from solving it and in order to get out of that you have to do Dymatize your cognition now we talked
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about this when we talked about attentional scaling and mindfulness just reminding you that what's happening in these disruptive strategies is very significant the automatization something else is going on with these disruptive strategies what these destructor strategies do is they increase the
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variation in your processing often by introducing a lot of noise right a lot of entropy into your processing you're increasing the variation and what you're paying attention to what processes you're activating in your brain you're just increasing the variation now Y is
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increasing variation good increasing variation is good because what when when I increase the variation what I can do is get more awareness right of what's invariant as I the more I vary what I'm doing the more I become aware of what's
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not changing right so as I move around this object right lots of stuff is varying but its shape is remaining constant to me throughout the variation and that's why I think of the shape as more real because it's
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invariant through all this variation so when I increase the variance so I pick up I'm more able to pick up on what's invariant now the thing we need to know is that there are two kinds of invariant two kinds of things that are not
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changing in your attempts to get a grip on the world there is good and right there's good invariants and bad invariants okay what's good invariants by opening up the variation I pick up on bigger patterns that aren't changing that are real
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patterns in the world this is what goes on in deep learning networks right you pick up on much more complex patterns of invariants you get more in contact with what's really going on again think about what you do when you want to make sure
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what something is you increase the variation not only am I looking at it and looking at it there I'm touching it I increase the variation to find out what's invariant because if I have increased variation and I find out
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what's invariant in it that often tells me what's more real that's good right so that can get me real patterns but there's also bad invariance bad invariants right it's like what's happening in when you're trying to solve the nine dot problem you keep trying to
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solve it and you keep failing to solve it because there's something you need to change that you're not changing bad invariants are ways in which you're formulating your problems framing your experience that's actually blocking you from solving your problem
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so Kaplan and Simon in 1990 talked about a heuristic a strategy we use called the notice invariance heuristic this is the idea across all of your different problem formulations that are failing you keep doing this and you keep doing
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and I can't get it I can't get it I can't get it when you increase the variation you can then apply the notice invariance here what am I not changing in all of these failures what am I not changing in all
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of my failed framings because very often what you're not changing is precisely what you need to change and so the notice invariance heuristic can help you break bad framing that has been causing your failure now this of course requires
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humility on your part this is why the deep connection between wisdom and humility I would I would suggest paying attention remembering your failures such that you can apply this would be very helpful now let's talk about this is one problem
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they were talking about Kaplan and Simon but what if what if I don't just have one error here but I have a whole system of errors so very often when you look at cognitive development right you take the
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two-year-old it's alright four-year-old because they can count you count out the five candies they can count they know that there's five here and there five here but they will reliably choose that row five candies why because the amount of space taken up
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is super salient to them we've talked about this before it misleads them but they will just make this error with candies they make this error systematically they make this error all over the place in many different domains it is a systematic error so I can
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reliably predict that the four-year-old will not only be making this error they'll be making errors about Sirian about trying to line objects up in terms of increasing height they'll have difficulties etc so it's not just one error it's an entire system of errors
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and the way you go through a developmental change what kids do is they find right they find a systematic pattern of errors and they find an insight that's not just about one problem but an insight that will apply
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systematically to that all of those interconnected interrelated errors and when they have that systematically penetrative insight when they found that nexus of errors so they can massively intervene on themselves then they go through a developmental change and they
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grow up cognitively they mature and that is what can be going on in the Enlightenment experience by opening up the variation massively you can not only connect to what's more real and feel more connected to the world remember the
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world you can get below the ways in which you are being held back in your own development you can zero in on the systemic errors and afford a radical radical developmental change as the adult is to the child this age is to the
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adult you can go through you can get one of the hallmarks of wisdom what McGee and Barbara called seeing through illusion into what is real okay so we're still not done this discussion because this is pivotal trying to understand these higher states
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of consciousness it's pivotal to understanding the power the legacy of the actual revolution and therefore what we need to selvedge from it we do not believe in its two world mythology but we cannot afford to abandon all of this
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powerful psycho technology of interval intervention of self transformation of self transcendence of the cultivation of wisdom and ultimately the deep enhancement of meaning in life by bringing about a developmental harmony within and a powerful conformity and connectedness to the world without so
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next time I want to continue and complete the discussion about the higher states of consciousness thank you very much for your time [Music] you you
Topics:higher states of consciousnessawakeningmindfulnessinsightcognitive fluencyattentional scalingmeaning crisisVervaekecognitive scienceBuddhism
